Religion
SCOTUS agrees to rule on yet another Christian privilege demand
Reading Time: 4 minutes Here we go again. The endless campaign by devout Christians to get special treatment in American commerce and the public square continues unabated, despite, over decades, multiple court cases unequivocally rejecting most of these serial entreaties. But it’s a new day in the j
Surprise! Empty pews are nonpartisan
Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s been common knowledge since the coronavirus pandemic arrived in America several years ago that empty pews have sharply increased, as churches, often controversially, closed their doors to protect congregants from spread of the deadly disease among their flocks. But in re
Did Krakatoa’s eruption turn Indonesia Muslim?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Starting at 11:05 p.m. on October 11, 2002, three terrorist bombs detonated in quick succession on the picturesque Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people, mostly Western tourists, in the teeming bar district. Historians said it had been a very long time coming—119 year
Nancy Pelosi’s swan song implies America is a Christian nation
Reading Time: 3 minutes US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s epoch-ending, gavel-passing speech Thursday on the floor of the House demonstrated—the Founding Fathers’ vision of secular governance notwithstanding—how casually and normatively embedded Christianity remains at the summit of American governmen
On bikinis and hijab
Reading Time: 5 minutes For Americans, as in most of the West, the meaning of the Arabic word “hijab” is as opaque as the term “bikinis” is clear. But the ancient misogynistic traditions that spawned both are still very much alive in the United States as elsewhere where Christianity still reigns. Th
Survey: How authentic are Christian evangelicals? Not very
Reading Time: 2 minutes “American evangelicals, it turns out, have a Jesus problem.” This quote by self-described evangelical Christian Republican David French came in a September 23 post of his newsletter, “The Third Rail” in The Atlantic. Referencing a report released last week on a biannual surve
The murder of Mahsa Amini: Is this what happens when religion rules?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Last week, Mahsa Amini died from an alleged “heart attack” while in police custody during a visit to Tehran, the capital of Iran. Her crime? Showing her hair. Amini’s murder has sparked mass protests and at least 17 deaths across Iran as well as global outrage in the days sin
Are fundamentalist religious schools retarding America’s future?
Reading Time: 5 minutes After firmly resisting New York state oversight for years, a private fundamentalist Hasidic Jewish academy in Long Island—one of the state’s largest schools—finally in 2019 agreed to give standardized state tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students. Every single s
One cosmic incarnation or (very, very) many?
Would there be an alien Jesus? What would it look like?
What makes ‘skeptical’ kids grow up to be God-believing adults?
Reading Time: 8 minutes If kids are the savvy, skeptical creatures that Will Gervais proposes in his recent essay, why do endless hordes of them in each generation turn into conservative American adults who uncritically worship invisible gods with zero objective verification? And what makes these sa
One man’s transformative journey from Republican to Democrat
Reading Time: 4 minutes My longtime best pal, Paul Sauser, a recent conservative-Republican-turned-Democrat and an evangelical Christian now uneasily reassessing his faith (without chucking it altogether), has, like many, Americans experienced somewhat of a religious and political transformation in
Maybe religion isn’t dying, but it’s definitely not well
Reading Time: 6 minutes In their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Byron R. Johnson and Jeff Levin, referring to a paper they recently published in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion (IJRR), argue that religiosity is not declining in the US but rather, “Americans are becoming more