A 22-year-old Nepalese woman named Gauri Kumari Bayak recently died alone in a windowless hut on a freezing cold night because she was menstruating. She didn’t die because someone forced her to sleep outside her warm home, but because, after centuries — perhaps millennia — of dominant Hindu religious traditions in her homeland, she believed she had to. In her culture, women are seen as unclean …

Apparently, would-be Muslim refugees to the United States and mainly-Christian interfaith proponents already here are now allies in a war against American Christianity. That’s the curious view of South Dakota state Sen. Neal Tapio, a Republican from Watertown, who tried to explain his position to reporters Thursday morning in a scrum at the state Capitol in Pierre. …

No wonder we human beings chronically believe in unbelievable things, such as the existence of gods and demons and “love at first sight.” Indeed, science has repeatedly demonstrated that such willful credulity may be as much a natural function of our humanity as the compulsion to join social clubs. In fact, the tendencies are related.
Several new books speak to this cautionary fact, as discussed in a fascinating piece by Elizabeth Kolbert …

Whether people believe in invisible spirits or questionable pseudoscience, they’re tickling the same primitive spot in human brains that makes human beings overly susceptible to the miraculous over the probable. Indeed, we are a species that far too often tends to instinctively believe in least-likely hypotheses. It is the same tendency that makes us immediately sense a dangerous stranger in the shadows when things go bump in the night. …

The regular “Sermonette” column Saturday on my local newspaper’s “Religion+News” page subtly reflects a growing disinterest in Christian faith in the United States. Church pews are clearly emptying. In the Mitchell (SD) Daily Republic article, titled “Time and God are on your side,” local pastor Rev. John Short reminded readers of the 365 days and 8,760 hours that will comprise 2018, clearly a generous expanse of time. …

I recently shared a very interesting breakfast conversation about religious skepticism with a 40-something Gen-Xer. He grew up swaddled in Christian belief and had long enthusiastically embraced it (even eventually becoming a board trustee of his church), but he then lost his religious mojo completely somewhere along the long, winding road to maturity. Although belief […]

South Dakota’s quirky religious predilections are revealed in a fascinating study published in 2017 by the respected Pew Research Center. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that we South Dakotans are indeed largely Caucasian-Christian folks. In fact, along with North Dakota, we lead the country in the percentage of white Christians in our populations – 71 percent for our northern neighbor and …

Call me obsessive, but after researching this topic for several years I now tend to sense the heavy presence of Christian assumptions in virtually every sphere of American life. Lately, it was an overt government word-ban initiative related to official funding-request documents. The pertinent words “to be avoided” are: vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based and […]