Special Interests are Not “Ideas”: Moral Lessons from the Health Care Reform Factory
Politics at this level is a blood sport, not a seminar, and the president seems a bit behind on his combat training.
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“God Needs You To Get Out of the Bubble”: Riverside Controversy Exposes Theological, Racial Fault Lines of the Christian Progressive Movement
What does it mean that Rhodes Scholar and Progressive Evangelical Brad Braxton resigned as senior pastor of the influential Riverside Church? In this discussion over the implications, a reverend and a scholar ask whether multiracial churches require making white people comfortable, why God needs liberal protestants to get out of the bubble, and what the future holds for the mainline church as a whole.
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Economy Yields Too Few Prophets
Few mainstream journalists are truly capturing the reality of the economy in terms of the nation’s worst off. As of last month, the actual number of workers in crisis is not the 14 million but more like 29 million, or 18 percent of the total workforce. Where are the religious coalitions willing to challenge the president’s policies?
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Respectability and Its Discontents: Missing the Louche, Loud, and Lovely World of Sexual Outlawry
In this meditation on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots an ordained minister, while eulogizing his own outlawry, notes that God’s goodness is evident in the way in which new and seriously maladjusted queer youth are still rising up to bring new energy and edge to the movement.
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Gordon Gekko Gets God: The Heritage Foundation of Theology
Even after the “revelation” that letting unregulated moneymen run the country isn’t a good idea, the neoliberals at the Heritage Foundation are still churning out the message; like the latest book by “theologian” Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution And Not the Problem.
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I Owe, Therefore I Am: Why Struggling Against the Banks is a Holy Obligation
When we take the approach that “all are sinners,” we confuse big-time criminality with small-time folly. This moral obfuscation allows the far greater misfeasance of corporate creditors to get airbrushed out of the picture.
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RDPulpit: No Time for Lukewarm Economic Reform
New dimensions of criminality and injustice in the world of finance are revealed every day. So why are religious progressives—who know a thing or two about revelation—still posing, equivocating, and trimming around the edges while poor people suffer at the hands of a predator elite?
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Change, Not Charity: What Ails the New Left-Right Coalition Against Poverty
The Poverty Forum’s supposedly cross-the-spectrum plan to reduce poverty runs the gamut—from A to B. While it is perpetually depressing to see the Democrats drinking the Kool-Aid of “No Enemies Among The Privileged,” it actually turns the stomach a bit to see faith leaders who claim to care about the poor slurping up the same reality-free brew.
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Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act
The Employee Free Choice Act will go a long way toward expanding workplace democracy. Progressive religious leaders, whatever their disagreements might be, must come together to support the restoring of dignity to those who labor honestly.
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RDPulpit: Israel, The Great Unmentionable
Christians should neither excoriate Israel nor remain silent in the face of horrendous attacks in Gaza and elsewhere. Rather, according to Rev. Laarman, American Christians must heed King and make the issue about US policy and the kind of nation we aspire to be.
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