Megan Wells is an IT tech and sports blogger in Chicago.
It really frustrates me when religious people choose to deny themselves an activity that they enjoy because society won’t accommodate their restrictions, which have zero basis in reality. (The fact that they then tend to get angry about everyone else being stubborn and inflexible is just the icing on the frustration-cake.) But when inclusiveness costs as little as changing the start time of a basketball game, or allowing Muslim soccer players to wear hijabs, my sympathies tend to err in… Read more
The Robert M. Beren Academy is an Orthodox Jewish school in Houston, TX. Its men’s basketball team, the Beren Academy Stars, qualified for the Division 2A state championship tournament – but, since the games fall during the Jewish Sabbath, the team has chosen to withdraw from the tournament on religious grounds. If Beren were a member of a secular sports league, or even a member of an explicitly Christian league, all I’d really have to say to them is “tough… Read more
Tim Tebow drove everybody crazy. His conspicuous religiosity, and the adulation it won him from so many quarters, was a kind of slow torture of Christian privilege for anyone who thinks faith should be a private thing. Now there’s a new kid in town: Jeremy Lin, point guard for the New York Knicks. Lin, a Taiwanese-American born in California, graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics and a fierce desire to play professional basketball. Cementing his status as scrappy… Read more
So, this happened. That’s kicker Jake Russell of the Ohio State Buckeyes. His bio says that he’s a freshman. When I first came to college, I was still extremely religious, having grown up in an almost exclusively Catholic environment. Meeting people with radically different worldviews was a shock. But it takes a special kind of person, even assuming that sort of background, to wish hate on someone else. Then again, if you ask Jessica Ahlquist, maybe folks like Russell aren’t… Read more
Women in Iran have it rough. This wasn’t always the case – at least, not the way it is today. Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, most Iranian women didn’t wear veils. They were active in high levels of academia and government, so much so that even the conservative Revolution couldn’t completely erase their involvement. The civil law protected women’s rights, even when it contravened Sharia law to do so. There is a history, within living memory, of liberated women… Read more
