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Nikki Haley’s Slavery Omission Typifies the GOP’s Tragic Pact with White Supremacy

…ch-segregationist George Wallace running on the American Independent Party ticket would sweep those up, but he did narrowly win the general election—thanks to Strom Thurmond, the segregationist senator of South Carolina, a former Democrat who had become a Republican in 1964. Thurmond helped him win the Republican nomination and the presidency by vouching for the Nixon/Agnew ticket to other former Southern Democrats. It was Reagan, who later cement…

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Olympic Ritual and Religion, Hosted by a Religion-less State

…ensive ticket, and the hardest one to come by at the Modern Olympics, is a ticket to the Opening Ceremonies, where precisely nothing of athletic note happens at all. I would like to connect those three observations, with the Opening ceremonies of the XIXth Olympiad in mind. One of the little remarked aspects of the Modern Olympic Games is its explicit status as a religious revival. The founder, or “renovateur,” of the Modern Olympic Games, Pierre…

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The Sacred and the Dead: It’s (Not) Just a Box of Rain

…ollege in 1989, I went to my first Dead show near Chicago. I didn’t have a ticket (and didn’t care so much about the music, really) but wanted to see what all the fuss was about from a safe distance in the parking lot where the aromas and sights and sounds and colors and patterns and vibe of Deadhead central overwhelmed my senses. I bought a silver bangle for $10 and almost 26 years later, it’s still there on my right wrist. In my early 20s, I end…

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Leave It to Trump to Split a Catholic-Evangelical Bloc That’s Generations Old

…ector of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, called the Trump-Pence ticket the “most anti-Catholic GOP presidential ticket in modern history” because of not only Trump’s many shortcomings but also Pence’s record of blocking the Catholic Church’s efforts to resettle Syrian refugees in Indiana. Trump’s poor standing with Catholic voters resembles his “Mormon problem,” as I have written about. Taken together, the Catholic and Mormon rejection…

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Community Organizing and Symbolic Electioneering

…n media events. Most major decisions about the composition of presidential tickets — and even policy platforms — are made well before the speaker hits the rostrum. The delegates serve a largely symbolic role, and the speakers’ real audience is the electorate at large, following (or so both political parties hope) convention coverage at home on television and the Internet. Thus, the rhetoric that emerges from presidential nominating conventions sho…

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Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

…tian radical A. J. Muste calling Moses the organizer of “Brickmakers Union Number 1” and a pacifist Russian rabbi named Tamaret—wove them all into a new Telling of the tale of freedom. In that Telling, the then ongoing, even now unfinished, struggle of Black America for freedom was interwoven with the ancient story of the Israelites’ struggle to end their slavery under Pharaoh. Where the old Haggadah had what seemed to me a silly argument about ho…

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Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

…w dozen yards of the riders and take pictures of the scene with their cell phone cameras. Traffic on College Avenue begins to pick up. “You’re protesting God!” a motorist hollers when he catches sight of one of the Soulforce banners. Finally a slender young man wearing a “CBC Soccer” jacket ventures all the way to the sidewalk. “I just kind of want to show them I care,” says Jonathan Jacobs, a junior at the college. Jacobs, whose family moved to C…

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Too Hot for Shul: Rabbis Seek Healthy Israel Dialogue After Gaza

…ger chilling effect in the American Jewish world, yes; I’ve gotten so many phone calls and voicemails [from people] who have had something happen to them—this summer I do believe it has gone off the rails.” Yet, Kleinbaum said, “I do think my job is to create a Jewish space in which this discussion can take place without saying this person is not a good Jew and another is a good Jew. That, I think, is a reachable goal for my community.” Many rabbi…

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Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

…ader. What was the culture of the prison? At night, there was one guard for 800 prisoners. In the Rio prison system there’s no real government presence; state control in the prisons is just a façade. The prison gangs are the most powerful presence, but the church exerts a strong influence too. There were about 400 inmates in the gang camp inside the prison, and 40 to 50 in the church camp. The rest were neutral people who kept to themselves in the…

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A Muslim Reflects on Christian Theologian (and UCLA Coach) John Wooden

…er of the amazing things about him. He was approachable, answering his own phone and mail, meeting with complete nobodies like me. I thanked him for the basketball lessons that I had learned from him, but more importantly for the life lessons. His beloved wife Nellie had passed away in 1985 after 53 years of marriage, and my wife had died suddenly in 1992. Coach gave me a powerful model for dealing with that loss, a reminder that those we loved we…

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