Americans manifested staggering rudeness and aggression during a public gathering with the local Muslim community on June 4 in Tennessee.  The event, sponsored by the American Muslim Advisory Council (AMAC), was titled, “Public Discourse in a Diverse Society,” but there was more shouting than discourse.  And worse, when a speaker mentioned a 2007 arson attack which burned down a mosque in Columbia, TN, the audience broke into shouts of joy.  Joy. Yes, joy.  Invest 14 seconds of your time to... Read more

Boston College School of Theology and Ministry Associate Professor Nancy Pineda-Madrid has been elected to the position of vice president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS). She will succeed to the post of president-elect of the academy in 2014-15 and president in 2015-16. She will be responsible for planning the ACHTUS colloquium for June 2015, which will be held in Milwaukee. Pineda-Madrid’s teaching and research interests are soteriology, feminist theology and US Latino/a theology. She is... Read more

Evangelicals are being challenged to change their views of gays and lesbians, and the pressure isn’t coming from the gay rights movement or watershed court rulings: Once silent for fear of being shunned, more gay and lesbian evangelicals are speaking out about how they’ve struggled to reconcile their beliefs and sexual orientation.Students and alumni from Christian colleges have been forming gay and lesbian support groups – a development that even younger alumni say they couldn’t have imagined in their own... Read more

Munira Ezzeldine, a marriage counselor in Irvine, Calif., who is one of the instructors of a premarital course, tells me that Islam in America is at a “kind of crossroads now.” She explains, “We don’t have something called dating in the Western context, you know with pre-marital sex and all the stuff that comes with it.” But young Muslims are also not interested in having arranged marriages as their parents and grandparents did. “They actually want to get to know... Read more

Jason Collins’ coming-out party was a historic and controversial story, feel-good for some, an abomination for others and an “uncomfortable conversation” on “Outside the Lines” that still resonates in ESPN conference rooms and in the ombudsman’s mailbag. More than one ESPN manager told me it was “a learning experience” and then couldn’t come up with what had been learned. How about this: The tricky trifecta of religion, race and sexuality exposed not only the fault-lines in “OTL’s” preparation but the inconsistent performance of... Read more

Unless you have had your head buried in the sand for the past decade or so, if you are involved in the academic study of ‘religion’ you will have come across the field of ‘Material Religion’. People have written books about it. Others founded a journal to study it. Edited volumes contain near innumerable chapters on it. Leading international Religious Studies podcasts have focused on it. And the BSA Sociology of Religion Study Group made it the focus of their annual conference at Durham University, UK, in April... Read more

The words above the Supreme Court read, “Equal Justice Under the Law.” This week, two Supreme Court outcomes dramatically affected the reality of those words. On Tuesday, in a 5-4 decision, a key component of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 was struck down, jeopardizing equal justice under the law especially for black, Hispanic, and low-income people whose voting rights have historically been assaulted and have continued to be suppressed as recently as the 2012 election. In fact, Section 4... Read more

A third of young Americans say they are currently religiously unaffiliated — the highest number in U.S. history. Will the trend continue? We talk to believers from around the country who are trying to stem the tide and get people ‘back to God.’ Read more

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two widely anticipated landmark rulings that were victories for gay rights advocates: striking down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that banned federal benefits to same-sex couples who are legally married in their state and declining to rule on California’s Proposition 8, which moves California into position to join the ranks of the 12 other states plus the District of Columbia where same-sex marriage is legal. Clearly, the rapidly shifting public opinion... Read more

On Tuesday the Supreme Court overturned a central part of the Voting Rights Act, one of the main accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement for African Americans. Southern states, consistent with the racist legacy of slavery that has shaped their politics for the past 150 years at least, are now rushing to put in place new rules to make it more difficult for African Americans and Latinos to vote. Then on Wednesday the Supreme Court declared the “Defense of Marriage Act” unconstitutional, thereby... Read more