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Is the faith-talking, centrist, “new breed” of Democrat like Heath Shuler on its way out?

The majority of abortion clinics in Kansas, given less than 2 weeks to comply with new toilet and closet size regulations, would have shut their doors but for a federal judge’s 11th-hour temporary decision to block the regulations. Was it really safety or a backdoor attempt to end abortion in the state?

Breivik’s racism is different from others that came before. It’s belonging to a generic European Christianity that makes you good, and your opposition to Islam that makes you smart.

If Anders Behring Breivik isn’t a Christian terrorist, then the same can be said of Osama bin Laden and many other Islamist activists—whose writings show that they were much more interested in Islamic history than theology or scripture and imagined themselves as re-creating glorious moments in Islamic history in their own imagined wars.

I was both saddened and gratified by Mark Oppenheimer’s follow-up piece on the authors of Open Embrace, a Protestant couple’s jointly-written book on why they chose not to use artificial contraception, and how it helped their marriage. Turns out, though, it didn’t work out so well for them. And I was sad to hear it. Truly.

Sharon Slater, American anti-gay activist and president of Family Watch International, recently encouraged delegates attending a law conference in Lagos, Nigeria to resist the United Nations’ calls to decriminalize homosexuality. Keynoting the Nigerian Bar Association Conference, Slater told delegates that they would lose their religious and parental rights if they supported “fictitious sexual rights.” One such “fictitious right” is the right to engage in same-sex sexual relationships without going to jail.

Grayling’s New College of the Humanities “is not an atheist institution,” he and other spokespeople for the university have stated repeatedly. But it’s hard to imagine Richard Dawkins soft-pedaling on the topic of religion. Grayling insists that he’s not as vehement as his colleague. “I’m the velvet version,” he likes to say.

The New Apostolic Reformation has been in the news a great deal since Rick Perry first announced his prayer rally, The Response. Sarah Posner has an investigative journalist’s view of this movement, its place in religious movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, and in politics. Here she is in conversation with Anthea Butler, a scholar of American religious history.

Coline Jenkins, great-great granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, spoke just weeks ago at the anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Sentiments, recalling her time as a teen visiting her grandmother who had “all the original major works of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her attic— The Declaration of Sentiments, The Woman’s Bible.” It was only years later, she said, that it dawned on her that she had been but “two floors away from all that history.” She further reflected on how, as a girl staying at a campground near Seneca Falls, she had gone to a laundromat that, as it turned out, was formerly the site of the Wesleyan Chapel—the site of the “largest bestowal of democratic freedoms in the U.S.” Could one imagine, she asked, “a laundromat in Independence Hall?”

As scholar Scott Kugle knows well, to be both Muslim and gay means the possibility of having to “come out twice”—with the likely chance of encountering either homophobia or Islamophobia (or both), depending on the context.