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“Tell Me What You Believe About Ferguson, and I’ll Tell You What You Believe About God”: A Missouri Pilgrimage

By Anita Little

…sat in a frigid hotel conference room in Bridgeton, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis that represents the outer edge of the city’s white flight, I took stock of the 30-odd people surrounding me. An interesting mix, some of the attendees were longtime activists of color, some seemed to be defectors from the traditional black church, some were white Christian millennials eager to dive into social movements and a few were older white congregants start…

Louis C.K., Paige Patterson, and the White Male Forgiveness Charade

By Dianna Anderson

…ear later, both men are returning to the limelight. Louis C.K. has begun testing stand-up material at New York’s famous Comedy Cellar—including, reportedly, a joke about rape whistles. And Patterson who has already preached since his ignominious firing, is slated to co-teach a class called “Christian Ethics: The Bible and Moral Issues” at Southern Evangelical Seminary alongside seminary president Richard Land. Both returns have been met with const…

Unmasking the “Veiled Prophet” Behind a 135-Year-Old St. Louis Tradition

By Spencer Dew

…rked as “America’s Birthday Parade” rolled through the streets of downtown St. Louis and across television sets coast-to-coast. This civic celebration served the cause of St. Louis boosterism (“Great Things Are Happening!” in the Gateway to the West, the parade’s logo declared) as well as offering an expression for patriotic pride (veterans were honored, and our national colors were much used). In many ways a throwback to an earlier time in Americ…

Blame Series Bonus: How Federal Policy Created America’s Fergusons

By Andrew Aghapour

…ry, federal, state, and local governments implemented policies—not only in St. Louis, but in every metropolitan area in the country—to segregate those areas by race. In St. Louis, it began with the adoption of an ordinance in 1916 prohibiting African Americans from living on blocks where whites were the majority and prohibiting whites from living on blocks where blacks were the majority. So the purpose of this ordinance was to segregate neighborho…

Romney Lets his Inner Mormon Out Just in Time for Tampa

By Joanna Brooks

…at the RNC.]— folks in the viewing audience will no doubt be stunned by just how startingly normal it sounds. For a preview, allow me to do a little Mormon explaining (Mo-splaining?) of LDS prayer forms. LDS people are taught to adopt and adapt the general model of the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament for use in personal and family prayers and prayers offered at group events. While set prayers are used for rites like baptism and the weekly sacr…

Pricey Tickets, Cranky Citizens, and Priests Behind Bars as Philadelphia Prepares For Papal Visit

By Anthea Butler

…ground is where the altar will be. Photo by Anna Orso, for Billy Penn Yup, stay at home, post up, get your drinks and popcorn, and watch in your jammies. Much of the confusion and drama lies with the poor messaging of the World Meeting of Families and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Both have managed to make both Catholics and non-Catholics so angry that many will certainly stay away. What happened? Why has the WMOF and the Archdiocese mangled th…

“I ‘Came Out’ For Marriage Equality”: An Anti-Gay Activist Changes His Mind

By Welton Gaddy

…hy about this”? Well, I would say to them that it takes a weak person to just listen to what you’re told, or to follow the lead and do what others do, or to buy in to some of the rhetoric that organizations like the National Organization for Marriage spew out every day—that is indicative of a person who hasn’t made up their own mind, who hasn’t examined the issue independently and come to an independent conclusion. Because I’m of the belief that i…

Mile-High Identity Politics: What We Can Learn From the Same-Sex Seating Controversy

By Eboo Patel

…ly offered to other people with different identities? No doubt this is a distinct circumstance based on a very particular identity, but cultural progressives are often on the vanguard of fighting for special accommodations for specific groups. Women-only, black-only and LGBT-only spaces are a relevant parallel. Such spaces take into account the issues related to certain social identities (the personal) and advocate for a reshaping of the public sq…

The Contested Religious Powers of Baseball on Display in Cuba

By Sean O'Neil

…hard to match. And to those who found his presence at an exhibition game distasteful or disrespectful in the face of the world’s grief, he responded, “The whole premise of terrorism is to try to disrupt people’s ordinary lives.” One of his proudest moments as president, he explained, was watching a defiant David Ortiz, one of the many Major League Baseball players from the Dominican Republic, respond to the Boston Marathon bombing with a resoundin…

The Key to Understanding the Federalist Society Isn’t Originalism — It’s This 800-Year Old Tradition

By Peter Schwartz

…hich Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. With no feudal past to constrain us, with Protestantism and the Enlightenment the beginning of our history, we’re often blind to political and legal activity within our own nation that doesn’t conform to liberal democratic precepts. Like the android host Dolores in the first season of Westworld, when presented by her father with a photo of a smiling woman in an alien urban landscape, we als…