Scapegoats have long been accused of being responsible for diseases, epidemics, and famines. Since the emergence and spread of the novel coronavirus, religious leaders and politicians from different religions and countries have blamed LGBTQ people as the cause of the pandemic. Among the accusers are the American Cardinal Raymond Burke and the Mexican Bishop Ramón Castro, from the Catholic Church; the evangelist pastor Ralph Drollinger, leader of the “White House Bible Study”; the politician and orthodox rabbi Meir Mazuz; and Muqtada al-Sadr, an Iraqi Shia cleric, military leader...

As an instructor, I am an ardent proponent of in-person interaction and the use of printed books, and I have never taught online before the COVID-19 pandemic shifted teaching to fully online platforms in the spring of 2020. Yet in this adjustment, the labor of starting anew, while frustrating at times, granted me the opportunity to experiment and refine pedagogical strategies to foster virtual connection for an upper-level undergraduate seminar on religion and politics in East Asia from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. In the transition to teaching fully online, I...

The United States Census Bureau reported that in 2016, 93 percent of people aged fifteen to thirty-four had a smartphone, and that almost 88 percent of them owned a computer with an internet connection.¹ Technology is ever evolving and has become a crucial way of communicating and teaching. Online learning has grown at such a brisk pace that in 2016 alone, six million students were taking at least one distance-education course.² This demand for online classes has become...