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A participant in the first study to use the term “ex-gay” to describe gay-to-straight change has called the study into question.

The SBC must be aware that their argument is weak. Why else resort to name-callling?

This summer, the world’s largest clock began to tick in Mecca—Islam’s holiest city—marking the beginning of Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims. After the inauguration of the clock, there were calls from many Muslims to replace Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)—the world standard for 125 years—with Mecca Time.

Our interview goes behind the controversy-inducing press coverage.

Last week the London branch of the Occupy movement spawned one of the biggest British religion stories of recent years. The reason is that the occupiers chose to pitch their tents on a pedestrianized area right in front of St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s next to the London Stock Exchange…

Should St. Paul’s Cathedral be responsible to regular worshippers trying to get to Evensong or the protestors who might be modeling the social concerns of Christ?

Zombie Jesus might seem silly to you and horror may not be your thing. But spiritual seekers might want to ponder the imagery of horror precisely because it runs against some of their instincts. Freud famously argued in his essay “The Uncanny” that horrific fairy tales terrified us as children because they reminded us of the vulnerability of our bodies. The horror tradition, maybe especially the zombie narrative, does the same for adults.

Ours is primarily a linear society which rewards building, doing, improving, and growing. It’s no surprise, then, that countercultural movements have tended to emphasize circles: consensus rather than hierarchy, egalitarianism, nuanced notions of ‘progress.’ Does this sound familiar? It should—it’s behind a lot of what observers have noticed about the Occupy movement: that there are no clear goals, no policy prescriptions, no realistic (i.e., incremental) demands.

We Americans don’t like to talk about death or the dead, and since many Protestants have difficuty with Catholic practices around prayer to the saints and prayers for the dead, our practices around All Saints’ and All Souls’ days have drifted in very different directions, leaving more space for the secular, non-religious practices around these festivals.

If we read the Arab Spring as a zero-sum game between Islamists and secularists, we’re going to miss what’s happening; if we imagine Arab democracy will look like secular Western democracy, we will likely be disappointed. And if we assume reference to Islam and democracy reveals only hypocrisy, insincerity, or ideological confusion, we’re likely to be surprised.