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I have some experience with Boyd K. Packer. I attended a BYU devotional in the early ’90s where he spoke at length about how homosexuality was “unnatural.” I was disturbed by Elder Packer’s ignorance on this issue twenty years ago—and I was disturbed by his ignorance on the same topic on Sunday morning.

As you probably know, a couple of weeks ago the pope was in England smack-talking the atheists. What is generally less known is that, at the same moment that pope was having his say with the UK’s radical non-believers, Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno, also in England, was busy talking…

Growing up in Topeka, Kansas, wasn’t exactly Hell—not for me anyway. Then again, I spent most of my 18 formative years there hiding from Topeka’s foremost biblical authority, the infamous anti-gay funeral picketer, Rev. Fred Phelps. As a child I had a secret buried deep within…

Not long ago I helped lead a graduate seminar in leadership in which I challenged the old idea of the heroic leader and messianic deliverer; an idea that has deep roots in all three Abrahamic faith traditions. Not one person in that seminar room—not even the white males who were present—had anything good thing to say about the old model. Everyone agreed that we can do better by listening to each other, trusting each other, and finding new paths together.

Visit the Salt Lake City Cemetery, and you’ll see headstone after headstone engraved with the Salt Lake temple, with an occasional depiction of some other LDS temple here and there. Unlike crosses adorning Catholic headstones or the Star of David on Jewish headstones, the LDS temple is not…

Religion watchers across the country followed the story, just over a week ago, of the frantic search in California for a “prayer group” that authorities feared intended to commit suicide. Was the “cult” label responsible for the hyperbolic coverage?

Finally, empirical proof that tea partiers align with the religious right.

Two French film students, one of them Muslim, decided to walk the streets of Paris in niqab and short shorts calling themselves ‘Niqabitches.’

Good reading on the Scopes trial.

How not understanding religion undermines political debate.