Earlier this month, I wrote about a group of students at Lincoln County High School (in Kentucky). They were fed up with the way their administrators let students vote on whether or not to have a graduation prayer, knowing that the majority of students were Christians who want nothing more than to have the school honor their faith in public. So they spoke to the principal and got the policy changed: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Atheist philanthropist Todd Stiefel recently appeared on the Jesse Peterson Radio Show. Peterson is a black, religious, Tea Party advocate who doesn’t think very highly of atheists. The whole episode was crazy, but two parts stood out in particular. The first occurs at the 4:45 mark, after Todd talks about how Gallup polls have shown that people would not vote for atheists even if they were qualified members of their own political party: [Click headline for more…] Read more
After Mother Jones published an excerpt from journalist Kathryn Joyce’s new book The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption last month, the Christian media went into defense mode. The excerpt offered a rarely-seen view into overseas adoptions, where children can sometimes be taken away from their (very much alive) birth parents, who are led to believe the separation is only temporary. … So what’s the real story? Are these criticisms valid? I sent many of the questions I had to Kathryn Joyce and she was kind enough to respond (via email): [Click headline for more…] Read more
Yesterday, the city of North Miami, Florida held elections for Mayor. The election was notable for the rest of us because candidate Anna L. Pierre claimed she was endorsed by Jesus Christ: It turns out Pierre didn’t fare so well: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Back in February, Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia celebrated the opening of its 80th season with the unveiling of a mural painted by artist D.R. Mullins. The mural “was designed to reflect the theater’s global reach and its past” and included an image of the Hindu god Shiva: “The Eastern influence, I wanted to show everybody who comes to Barter we’re not necessarily a regional theater, we’re world famous,” [Mullins] said. “I think it speaks of Barter’s continuing trend to go multicultural.” Well, that’s one way to do it. In any case, no one in their right mind would see this as some endorsement of Hinduism. The artist didn’t say that and no one would take him seriously even if he did. But community members aren’t happy about it. They took their complaints to the Washington County Board of Supervisors and the city officials decided to take action by… unanimously voting to put up the Ten Commandments on government property: [Click headline for more…] Read more
A new Gallup poll finds that people who claim no religious faith — atheists, agnostics, and (annoyingly) people who are “spiritual but not religious” — are most likely to be “pro-choice” and least likely to be “pro-life”: [Click headline for more…] Read more
The words “campus preacher” probably conjure up images of homophobic men who scream about hellfire at everyone as they walk by, but Ivan Imes (a.k.a. Jesus Talk), as he’s known to students, takes a very different approach at Louisiana State University: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Changes in the economics of providing health care have led to a wave of hospital mergers, many of which include wealthy Catholic organizations buying up struggling secular hospitals. We’ve already covered how these mergers can affect patient care by pushing religion-based standards of care onto non-Catholic patients. Now Washington, among the bluest of blue states when it comes to medical ethics, has become a flashpoint in this particular conflict, and the rights of patients rest in the balance. [Click headline for more…] Read more
Last weekend, Answers in Genesis — the ministry behind the Creation Museum — hosted a women’s conference focusing on modesty, marriage, and Creation. Unbeknownst to the organizers, I sent Kate (a contributor to this site) and Louise Kellar to the conference. The opinions expressed below are entirely their own. They wrote about their experiences separately and I have combined them into the narrative below. Since there was a lot of overlap, I’ve used Kate’s writing as the basis for the post with Louise’s observations in red. … [Click headline for more…] Read more
