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Religious Practices on Trial in Arizona: The Problem With “Experts”

By Johnny P. Flynn

…s. In following the Ray story over the past few months, I am amazed at the number of non-Indian sweat lodge experts the media has been able to locate. Few Indians if any have been interviewed; and even decidedly liberal MSNBC featured Court TV anchor Ashleigh Banfield as their expert on the sweat lodge. Banfield’s expertise, admitted on air, was one sweat experience with her stepbrother or brother-in-law (she wasn’t sure how he was related), “step…

Does God Want Jeremy Lin to Win?

By Jay Michaelson

…ether in terms of kindness, or humility, or following their dreams, or any number of other positive values—just as it’s at its worst when it takes agency away. The particular myths that Tebow or Lin happen to believe in are secondary (and of course, I mean ‘myths’ in the sophisticated sense of stories that give meaning to human life, not false tales). What’s primary is that they believe, despite ample reasons not to do so, in the possibility of hu…

Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It drew a number of high-profile participants and attendees from anti-gay religious activists in the U.S. A centerpiece of the “Humanum” conference was a set of six videos, which it turns out were produced by Mark Regnerus, author of a discredited report on “family structures” that is still widely cited by anti-gay activists. Conservative activists, including Tony Perkins, Brian Brow…

‘Welcome to the War’: What a Creationist Conference Can Teach us About Evangelical Vaccine Resistance

By Caroline Matas

…st likely to indicate outright refusal to take a Covid-19 vaccine, while a number of other studies have also found that number hovering close to 25 percent. Journalists and academics alike have attempted to make sense of this discrepancy, pointing to existential fear, anti-intellectualism, and Christian nationalism as potential influences on American evangelicals’ vaccine antipathy. As a scholar of American evangelicalism and media, I am inclined…

Resurrection of ‘Comstock Laws’ Would Threaten Access to Abortifacients — But Even That Fear Misses Bigger Picture

By Gillian Frank

…ncy. As historian Andrea Tone has shown in detail, Lysol was just one of a number of unregulated contraceptive products advertised in women’s magazines and in newspapers. Comstockery, in other words, endangered women by creating an environment where quackery and scammers could thrive. Unsurprisingly, a harsh cleaning product had adverse effects. A 1936 book by Rachel Lynn Palmer and Sarah K. Greenberg, M.D. called Facts and Frauds in Feminine Hygi…

Religious Opposition To LGBT Equality Softening

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…nd other Christians marching together at Pride. In recent years, the small number of Christians who turn up to protest against Pride have been vastly outnumbered by the Christians participating in it. Hill also noted religious support in the UK last April for a new law “to allow religious elements in civil partnerships, while last year the Quakers became the first major Christian denomination to resolve to carry out same-sex marriages.” Even here…

Elaine Howard Ecklund Wants to Dispel Myths Surrounding Religious Resistance to Science

By Sammy Feldblum

…a—I don’t know if I should say unusual, but I can say that there’s a large number of religious organizations in Houston. I think that’s patently obvious, but also true from the research. There are potential civic resources through those religious organizations. You saw it in the kerfuffle about Lakewood, the big church there on the freeway, opening its doors. And people saying “why isn’t this enormous church opening its doors for people as a shelt…

Trump is a Nightmare, Sure, But Can He Actually Do Anything?

By Sunnivie Brydum

…January, opening email yields at least one urgent call to action from any number of progressive groups. As a journalist who’s spent the better part of a decade reporting on the LGBT community, I’m no stranger to the motivational value of panicked predictions of impending legislative disasters. That kind of all-hands-on-deck organizing has long proven crucial to forming a unified front of resistance, and indeed worked well to build broad coalition…

The War On Terror Is Over

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…alled for an increase of a hundred thousand troops, which would double the number presently there. Yet it will still be half of the numbers of Russian troops that the former Soviet Union had deployed in Afghanistan—and it lost the war, dragging much of the Soviet economy down with it. A similarly dismal prognosis is in store for America’s continuing presence in Afghanistan. Moreover, the persistence of US troops in the region will continue to prov…

New Research Links Spiritual-Not-Religious to Mental Disorder

By Elizabeth Drescher

…able to mental disorder.” This week, the news swam the pond to appear in a number of US news outlets. The research, led by University College London professor Michael King, reveals a population of “spiritual but not religious” Brits that generally tracks to the US population of “Nones” identified in a recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion in American Life. Some 35 percent of the more than 7,000 Brits surveyed indicated that they had “a religio…