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Americans Lose Faith, Sinning with Transfats, the Elusive God Particle

By Michael J. Altman

…department’s actions. Does the religious right have a role to play in the net neutrality debate? Another Baptist preacher is preaching against the sins of transfats. Rev. Michael O. Minor is fighting fat from his pulpit in the Mississippi Delta. He may want to mix in a few sermons on marriage. The Bible Belt has a higher divorce rate than the Northeast, researchers say. Some rabbis are getting help from comedy writers for their High Holy Day ser…

The Religious Duty to Come Out

By Jay Michaelson

…loset” is that it’s not just a set of walls around sexual behavior. It’s a net of lies that affects absolutely everything in one’s life: how you dress, who you befriend, how you walk, how you talk. And, more importantly, how you love. How can you build authentic relationships with anyone—friends, family—under such conditions? And if you’re religious, how can you be honest with yourself and your God if you maintain so many lies, so many walls runni…

Dispatches From the Beltway: Horton Hears Progressive Religion

By Robert P. Jones

…innacle of Johnson’s work turned out to be supporting the failed bid of Kenneth Blackwell for governor in 2006. And he found himself in a swirl of controversy: the IRS placed a lien on him and his wife for failure to pay $22,269 in income taxes and penalties from 2002 to 2004; his church and the school and hotel it owns showed a net operating loss of $1.5 million for its fiscal year ending in June 2007; official complaints were filed against his c…

Screw Pragmatism!

By Daniel Schultz

…nation for decades now, and what has it gotten us? A frayed social safety net, crumbling infrastructure, massive inequalities in income, health, and opportunity, and a financial system that makes a den of fire-breathing pirate vipers an appealing alternative. Oh, and the finest (and most expensive) military ever known to man. More properly, we have balanced the ideological insanity that is modern conservatism — don’t argue with me, when Ann freak…

Faith-Based Initiatives in the Obama Administration?

By Bill Berkowitz

…ities and climate change. “The challenges we face today—from saving our planet to ending poverty—are simply too big for government to solve alone,” Obama said. “We need an all-hands-on-deck approach.” A few weeks after President Bush took office in 2001, he issued an executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. One initiative’s major goal was the shrinking of government by farming out social safety net…

Note to the Tax-Slashers:
We Are Already Serfs

By Peter Laarman

…oice between us spending our dotage in helplessness and filth and our high-net-worth friends having to forgo next year’s Learjet, Americans will chose the personal sacrifice every time. Bitter words, but all too true. I will inject very own note of bitterness by observing that the conservatives who never tire of warning us about the road to serfdom seem to have missed the fact that we are already serfs. Not serfs of a totalizing government, as the…

A New Book By Esteemed Sociologist Robert Wuthnow Struggles to Show ‘Why Religion is Good for American Democracy’

By Peter Laarman

…ve scoring for religion, but also a few points on the plus side make for a net positive overall. He moves on to consider freedom of conscience, where it can certainly be argued that religious groups—mainly the dissident ones—did in fact make some degree of conscientious objection possible in the midst of raging war fever during both the First and Second World Wars. Wuthnow doesn’t dwell on the religious voices that were baying for the objectors to…

3 Reasons Catholic Bishops Are Holding Their Tongues on GOP Health Care Debacle

By Patricia Miller

…al to the poor and marginalized and “fundamentally alter the social safety net for millions of people,” they have limited their objections to written statements from Bishop Frank Dewane, chairman of Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, a little known backbencher with virtually no profile in the national media. As Michael Sean Winters noted in the National Catholic Reporter: …there was no “postcard campaign” like the bishops launche…

Hurricane Sandy Spawns Right-Wing Theodicy

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…om U.S. policy on Israel to, of course, the gays. The conspiratorial World Net Daily says Sandy is a sign that God is angry with the U.S. for defying his will on Israel: In fact, in his book Eye to Eye: Facing the Consequences of Dividing Israel, [William] Koenig points out that nine of the 10 costliest insurance events in U.S. history followed dramatic calls by U.S. officials for Israel to make land concessions in bids for peace with its neighbor…

‘People You May Know’ Reveals a War on Democracy Being Waged With Big Data

By Chrissy Stroop

…focus on in the film, that Cambridge Analytica and Gloo were using church networks to identify people who were mentally ill and target them, it’s a really evil system. CS: So let’s talk more about how churches use microtargeting and the findings you explore in People You May Know. KGV: When I approached people about this initially in the churches, I talked about the modern outreach programs, and how churches are growing digitally in general. And…