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Sharon Slater, American anti-gay activist and president of Family Watch International, recently encouraged delegates attending a law conference in Lagos, Nigeria to resist the United Nations’ calls to decriminalize homosexuality. Keynoting the Nigerian Bar Association Conference, Slater told delegates that they would lose their religious and parental rights if they supported “fictitious sexual rights.” One such “fictitious right” is the right to engage in same-sex sexual relationships without going to jail.

Coline Jenkins, great-great granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, spoke just weeks ago at the anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Sentiments, recalling her time as a teen visiting her grandmother who had “all the original major works of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her attic— The Declaration of Sentiments, The Woman’s Bible.” It was only years later, she said, that it dawned on her that she had been but “two floors away from all that history.” She further reflected on how, as a girl staying at a campground near Seneca Falls, she had gone to a laundromat that, as it turned out, was formerly the site of the Wesleyan Chapel—the site of the “largest bestowal of democratic freedoms in the U.S.” Could one imagine, she asked, “a laundromat in Independence Hall?”

As scholar Scott Kugle knows well, to be both Muslim and gay means the possibility of having to “come out twice”—with the likely chance of encountering either homophobia or Islamophobia (or both), depending on the context.

Grayling’s New College of the Humanities “is not an atheist institution,” he and other spokespeople for the university have stated repeatedly. But it’s hard to imagine Richard Dawkins soft-pedaling on the topic of religion. Grayling insists that he’s not as vehement as his colleague. “I’m the velvet version,” he likes to say.

On August 16, city inspectors closed down William Camacho’s barbershop on Pleasant Street in New Bedford, Massachusetts after they discovered three chickens, two pigeons, and four roosters in the basement. Votive candles and saint statues surrounded the birds, one of which was dead and placed neatly in a box. When is religious ritual a way to honor the positive powers of good, and when is it “devil-worshipping, occult, black magic”? Why is transubstantiation of a cracker less wacky than the wringing of a chicken’s neck that was bound for a dinner plate already?

The New Apostolic Reformation has been in the news a great deal since Rick Perry first announced his prayer rally, The Response. Sarah Posner has an investigative journalist’s view of this movement, its place in religious movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, and in politics. Here she is in conversation with Anthea Butler, a scholar of American religious history.

Whether we like it or not, Islam has become an indelible part of the culture and consciousness of 9/11. Ironically, the questions I regularly encounter have not actually changed much over the last ten years: Who was Muhammad, was he violent? What is Jihad? Why the scarves?

What might it mean for a synagogue, a church, a mosque, or a temple, to set up a video screen in its sanctuary and play these images of death from September 11—and then turn around and respond to them? What reinvented rituals might result from a ritualized, contextualized reception of these images? Such communal framing gets us beyond the questions of morbid voyeurism because it eliminates the one-way dimension and places images within a social setting. It further allows us to reflect and come to terms with dying, thereby stirring the potential for a good death.

The cliché that 9/11 “changed everything” is nowhere less true than in the post-9/11 impulse to declare war immediately. War was a choice as well as an echo: a choice Americans made, and an echo of how Americans have made decisions in times of previous conflict.

Is it appropriate that Catholic health care institutions want to be full participants in the U.S. health care system, while retaining the right not to provide contraception—a part of health care that nearly all sexually active adults use? The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops say yes, in a recent statement calling for the rescission of the “contraceptive mandate” provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And in this recent piece at First Things, Christopher T. Haley likewise warns that the religious exemption is too narrow to accommodate faithful Catholic health care. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, he says, would create a “Catholic ghetto.”