tmamone_cfi

By PRRI Staff Pessimism, Optimism, and Polarization As the U.S. enters the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election, two-thirds (67%) of Americans say the country is heading in the wrong direction, compared to only one-third (32%) who say it is headed in the right direction. Notably, this mood is slightly less pessimistic than public …

By Eve Ettinger The weeks leading up to my engagement were not fun. There was no anticipation of a celebration, no giddy whispering of my excitement to friends. Instead, I was spending hours in my senior year dorm room, pouring over my family’s copy of “Vine’s Concise Dictionary of the Bible,” trying to parse the …

By Alexandra Witze NASA is about to grab its first-ever taste of an asteroid. On 20 October, some 334 million kilometres from Earth, the agency’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will approach a dark-coloured, diamond-shaped asteroid named Bennu, with the aim of touching its surface for a few seconds — long enough to hoover up a collection of …

By Sarah Pulliam Bailey President Trump’s Washington hotel, where the average guest pays about $650 per night, has served as an epicenter of conservative politics during his administration. And among its high-profile visitors are the president’s evangelical advisers, according to records obtained by The Washington Post. They include James Dobson, a co-founder of Focus on …

By Juhem Navarro-Rivera Most secular Americans are expected to vote for the Democratic Party candidate in November, as secular voters have done for nearly four decades. While nearly seven in ten secular voters plan on voting for Joe Biden, a substantial minority will support President Donald Trump’s reelection bid. The 2020 Secular Voices Survey, a poll of 2,000 …

By Jack Jenkins Joe Biden and Donald Trump both visited churches over the weekend, a common practice for presidential candidates in the lead up to an election. Yet their experiences showcased not only dramatically different forms of American Christianity, but also contrasting examples of how religion can intersect with politics. According to pool reports, Biden, a …

By Quirin Schiermeier, Holly Else, Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, T.V. Padma, & Nisha Gaind Autumn heralds the start of a new academic year in much of the world, but in 2020, the term comes with the disruption of the COVID-19 outbreak and a surge in infections in many regions. Many universities have welcomed students and researchers …

By Alejandra Molina Darrin Johnson would like nothing better than to rid the Black community of organized religion. The way Johnson sees it, Black people “don’t need outside beliefs or higher powers.” “We have power,” Johnson said. “We are powerful entities. We just need to use that power.” As an organizer with his local Black …

By Ryan Burge There’s been a lot of discussion about the role of religion in the current presidential election, with pundits prognosticating whether President Donald Trump can still count on 80% of white evangelicals to vote for him as they did in 2016, or whether Joe Biden, an old-school Northeastern white Catholic, can erode his …

By David Frankfurter Outsiders to the Q-Anon conspiracy system evolving over the past few years may be confused by its references to Satanic rites in which children are supposedly abused. Of course, there’s never been the slightest evidence of murderous, child-abusing Satanic cults, despite extensive forensic investigations (by the FBI, in fact) back in the …

By Maria Cramer The Great Barrier Reef, one of the earth’s most precious habitats, lost half of its coral populations in the last quarter-century, a decline that researchers in Australia said would continue unless drastic action is taken to mitigate the effects of climate change. Researchers studied coral colonies along the length of the reef …

By Beth Stoneburner Many of you are familiar with the name John MacArthur because he’s the pastor of California’s Grace Community Church who’s been telling his congregation not to take the virus seriously. He’s openly celebrated the lack of social distancing and face masks in his congregation, once telling a packed house, “the good news is you’re here, you’re …