by Crystal St. Marie LewisR3 Contributor First posted at Crystal St. Marie Lewis If you don’t know who Tony Jones is, you should Google him. He’s a well-known, highly respected, and often sought-after voice in Emergent Christianity on topics related to theology. He’s also a seminary professor, successful author and an occasional source for controversy in churchier circles. Today, he stepped in it a little (okay a lot) when he wrote that he’s “tired of being called a racist” by African American... Read more

Christian Scientists think of angels as bright ideas. Angels are moments of clarity and expanded consciousness, moments of fresh vision and creativity, broadened perspective, and infusions of loving inspiration. Christian Scientists, who think of God as pure Mind, a divine principle of loving consciousness, see the intellect as a portal of revelation. I come from a line of Christian Scientists, educated people devoted to the art of learning, whose hearts and imaginations are fed by angelic ideas, who are restored... Read more

I have spent a great deal of my time as a professor of Biblical Studies working with the media— ABC, NBC, CBS, the BBC, the Discovery and History Channels and so on. There are really two different sorts of dealings with the media that people who teach religion or theology are likely to have in this day and age— questions from the press about recent archaeological discoveries or developments in the Lands of the Bible, and secondly Christmas and Easter... Read more

Fox News Radio host Todd Starnes is a man on a mission. For the past several years he’s been leading a crusade to prove that Christianity in America is being undermined by a secular, anti-religious agenda at the behest of the libertine big-government of President Barack Obama and his heathen minions. Earlier this month, as a guest on Hannity, Starnes trained his sights on the U.S. armed forces, accusing the President and the Department of Defense of a “Christian cleansing” of the... Read more

Last week, Alex Knapp and I got into a friendly debate on Twitter about whether it’s fair to stereotype conservative and fundamentalist religion as representative of religion generally. I wanted to flesh out some of my arguments there with additional data. I wish it were true that the religious left and the religious right were equally influential. If they were, they’d usually balance each other out, and there would be little reason for atheists to worry about undue religious influence in politics.... Read more

The festering scab of our rape epidemic has been ripped off (again), revealing the festering flesh underneath. Women and girls snatched off the street and held in chains for years as sex slaves; predators talking their way into the homes of struggling single mothers for access to their children; male soldiers and defense contractors raping their female and male fellow soldiers habitually and for sport with impunity; women, men, boys and girls trafficked around the world because they are cheaper... Read more

Long before I became familiar with the academic debates concerning calling God “Mother,” debates that I am now currently a part of as a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, I was being raised in a household where I instinctively understood that the divine presence was manifest in the loving hands and arms of mothers, and most especially in the life of my grandmother who raised me. My grandmother’s kitchen was a theological laboratory where she taught me how to love... Read more

Equinox Publishing has launched a new book series for its line of books in the study of religion and invites manuscripts and book proposals. Both single author and multi-author works are welcome. “Studies in Ancient Religion and Culture” (SARC), edited by Philip L. Tite (University of Washington), is concerned with religious and cultural aspects of the ancient world, with a special emphasis on studies that utilize social scientific methods of analysis. By “ancient world”, the series is not limited to... Read more

It’s graduation season, and as such a golden opportunity to observe the various ways religion is handled in American public life circa 2013.  A graduation is a momentous occasion for graduates and their families, and such a major rite of passage tends to evoke some kind of effort on the part of high school, college, and graduate school leaders (and commencement speakers) to reach for rhetorical profundity.  But what kind of profundity is acceptable in our pluralistic public space? Can... Read more

On April 29, the New York Jets released quarterback Tim Tebow from their roster after only a year on a team. In ironic timing, news almost immediately followed that Jason Collins, a veteran center in the NBA, had become the first active male athlete in a major American team sport to come out as gay. Collins and Tebow are a study in contrasts, perhaps especially when it comes to their faith. Tebow is known for game-saving theatrics and an equally performative profession of... Read more