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California’s Proposition 8 would overturn the state’s Supreme Court decision to allow same-sex marriage — right wing religious groups are girding for the battle they are calling “the Armageddon of the culture war.”…

A social movement comes into being when a group of people come to see themselves as sharing a common identity, a common story, and a common destination. How did Dr. King’s rhetoric inform the consciousness of the civil rights era?

“For me, as a queer person of color and an Asian American who is also gay, I often feel like I’m never able to bring the two together, I’m always forced to choose. Will I be Asian American today or gay today? In the LGBT community, even where I feel really safe, I rarely hear anything that affirms my cultural background or the racism of notions of beauty in the community.”

In a recent essay Marcia Pally argues that a generation of “new evangelicals” have “left the right.” But left it for what?

A recent piece by novelist Nathaniel Rich focused on eccentric Japanese researcher Shin Kubota, who studies the “immortal jellyfish.” But what are we after when we seek immortality? And does this quest tell us more about us than the natural world?

Can business owners assert that their free exercise is being burdened when the coverage mandate is imposed not on them, but on their business? Does the for-profit corporation or LLC have religious beliefs of its own? Does General Motors practice religion? If not, do smaller corporations exercise religion? Or are the small businesses really asserting the religious rights of their owners?

Across South Carolina—and indeed the country—voters attend tiny churches, Bible studies, and prayer meetings. Their collective views on the candidates are much more difficult to measure and assess. And while they may be consumers of Christian talk radio, or televangelism, or other religious media, they are not lock-step followers of the decisions of elites who met at a ranch in Texas, or of Jim Bob Duggar, or of anything but their own received revelation.

Part of the scandal of American Christianity is that statistically the U.S. is the most Christian country in the world, and yet as a country we have the greatest income inequality in the world. And as a country we are uncritically committed not simply to being the most powerful nation in the world militarily, but to being as militarily powerful as the rest of the world combined.

An RD holiday sampler of stories & viewpoints we would have liked to read in 2012.

A scholar returning from a visit with Syrian opposition figures discusses the role of religion in the Syrian civil war, including whether it’s a sectarian war, what Americans need to know, and whether a post-war Syria will be an Islamic state.