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Dismisses lingering constitutional issues.

The theory that access to the internet will be the undoing of organized religion has resurfaced. But do the data show anything like this?

As if the whole Louie Giglio inaugural preaching debacle weren’t enough to sour many in on the religiosity of the American political process, conservative evangelical shock preacher Mark Driscoll stirred a hornet’s nest of Christianist hate and Christian outrage with the following…

It’s the hierarchy and killing, not just the discrimination.

On December 15, 2012 we lost a giant in the field of intellectual reflection on religion and social justice. I speak of Beverly Wildung Harrison, longtime professor of social ethics and feminist theory at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

I’ve often wondered why I hid from them that day. It was two years ago and a rousing Sunday service was winding down at the Portuguese Language Missionary Pentecostal Church in Queens.

As with periodic surveys showing relationships between levels of religiosity and well-being, this latest research is apt to find its way into many a sermon at declining churches across the U.K. and its former colonies. The gist (perhaps under a veneer of Christian pity): “There ya go! Your fakey-fakey, sage-burning, labyrinth-walking, church-of-the-blessed-ME ‘spirituality’ doesn’t make you happy.” Throw in some (largely inconclusive) studies on prayer and healing, an the result seems fairly obvious: Traditional believers are happier, healthier, and a heck of a lot saner. So there!

Western experts, looking for a comprehensible narrative, mistake consistency for fact. The misconceptions are further compounded by how difficult it is to identify a potential suicide—even mental health professionals can get it wrong—and how easy it is to conflate suicide terrorists with regular terrorists, the vast majority of whom don’t strap on bombs, preferring to stay alive and fight.

The Obama administration’s religion trap.

“I wanted to write a book that looked at what happened when you forced individuals and communities, as well as the environment, to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace. The best way to do this was to go to the nation’s sacrifice zones, those poorest pockets of the country that had been exploited first, to show what happens when you allow the marketplace to rule.”