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34% of BSA troops nationwide are LDS-sponsored.

Getting back together with Sarah Sentilles’ Breaking Up With God.

Stepping out publicly in a country where being gay is a matter of life and death.

I didn’t know the Christian values I purported to uphold! (And then promptly resigns.)

Anti-Obama propagandist the latest right-winger to denounce secular morality while taking advantage of the freedoms of a secular society.

It’s easy. It’s so easy to skewer the American South, to depict its denizens and cultural products and religious values as a homogenized clutch of deprivation and backwardness. It’s so easy that The Learning Channel is riding high in the ratings game these days with Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, the latest offering to confirm mainstream media’s deep investment in portraying a one-dimensional and abject South. The old weary stereotypes slide down smoothly, like the creamy underlayer of a hashbrown casserole. It takes too much work to refract the South through a variegated interpretive lens; and besides, would consumers buy into this multifaceted vision anyway? If ever there were a bullseye target for this kind of elitist and unhelpful framing, it would surely be Southern Gospel music.

Obama’s economic framing throws him off religious freedom track.

Ladies, start your binders.

By tracking the way Jesus Christ has been rendered through the American racial imagination—actually lining up all the evidence, from Puritan witch trial transcripts through stained glass windows through contemporary movies—Paul and Ed give us a new place to start a national discussion about who owns the image of God. That discussion has been going on, as The Color of Christ demonstrates, in communities of color since the early nineteenth century, if not before.

A new memoir by Israeli peace activist Miko Peled, the son an honored general, details a far different history from the one most Americans are familiar (or comfortable) with.