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How cross-pollination helped build the religious right.

In asking “Is Rick Perry Dumb?” Politico notes he’s reading a book by a Southern Baptist minister.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is a novel that steers clear of both strident attacks against religion and sanctimonious pieties. Instead, it explores the reality of religious fervor and examines the merit of both religious and anti-religious stances. And yet… because it is so respectful, patient, and level-headed, Goldstein’s novel may be actually more subversive than other, more straightforward anti-theistic tracts.

The Center for American Progress follows the money in a groundbreaking new report.

Everyone should know the story of Mitch Mayne.

I will not go to see the movie The Help because already I have encountered and regularly encounter enough messages suggesting history is made only by white agency. I will not go to see the movie The Help because I do not wish to view yet another production that tells me, a black woman, it is all about whiteness.

Walking down the street in my neighborhood a few years ago I was warmly greeted by the president of my synagogue, who cheerily introduced me to her new male companion. “You’ll like Rebecca,” she said. “She’s the one who gives those baseball sermons on Yom Kippur…”

By the time The Amazing Meeting rolled into Vegas, nerves were raw. It seemed like everyone was both sick of hearing about Elevatorgate and still nursing at least a little irritation toward what they perceived as either the sexism and insensitivity, or the political correctness, of their fellow atheists. Those of us in attendance dealt with it the best way we knew how—by joking about it. When that got old, we resorted to jokes about how bad our jokes were. Underneath the layers of meta-humor, however, it was clear that the heated argument had taken a toll on the atheist and skeptic community.

Responses to these events that ignore the underlying issues they express—that would see soccer-related violence, like the uprisings this week, simply as ferociously bad manners that can be corrected by cutting off social media access—invite more of the same. Absent religious institutions, soccer grounds, or other outlets as sites for organized repression and/or expression of the powerlessness and hopelessness that characterizes youth culture in places that simmer like East London all over the economically floundering developed world, more such outrage is always just one blind, stupid authoritarian action away.

The message of General Comment No. 34 is not only a clear condemnation of the blasphemy laws of countries such as Pakistan, which despite having ratified the ICCPR in 2008, continues to impose the death sentence for blasphemy and “defiling” the name of Prophet Muhammad. The Comment equally repudiates the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which has upheld Austrian, British, and Turkish laws against blasphemy and religious insult by invoking a sui generis right to “respect for the religious feelings of believers.”