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Obama in Copenhagen: It’s the Religion, Stupid

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…s central contention was that the Games would be “ambulatory,” moving to a new location every four years. They would not belong to any one city, but rather to humanity as a whole. He was also committed to including the New World in his Olympic vision (a Princeton professor was one of the original members of the Olympic Committee and Princeton athletes did especially well in Athens in 1896). So after Paris in 1900, the Games were set for North Amer…

A New, Softer Prosperity Gospel Still Can’t Deliver On Its Promises of Health and Wealth

By Verdell A. Wright

…your socioeconomic status. Bowler considers Joel Osteen an example of this new, softer prosperity gospel. Prosperity preachers began to refashion their ministers into sleeker, more inclusive forms in the early 1990s. More than a decade removed from the scandals wrought by the prosperity stars of the 70s, the movement now had people from all walks of life, talking in ways that a broader audience could relate to. Bowler writes that “the movement had…

Hitching a Freedom Ride: Gay Ain’t the New Black…

By Jonathan L. Walton

…tering an alliance based on a shared conception of exclusion, many African Americans are agitated by the analogy. For many African Americans, the term ‘civil rights’ has a distinctive connotation. And folks rightly argue that same-sex marriage was neither the aim nor a necessary conclusion of the civil rights movement. In short, “Gay ain’t the new black.” Personally, I tend to agree with this latter point, but for different reasons. For me, the as…

Will Women Priests Change the Church?

By Mary E. Hunt

…sts (womenpriests is all one word) movement, whose mission is to create “a new model of ordained ministry in a renewed Roman Catholic Church.” But there are many models of women’s leadership in Catholicism; I think it is important to frame the film in the context of the larger movement for change that characterizes 21st-century Catholicism, lest viewers are left with an incomplete picture. Part of the movement is indeed focused on women’s ordinati…

I Owe, Therefore I Am: Why Struggling Against the Banks is a Holy Obligation

By Peter Laarman

…action in this country that Wall Street couldn’t resist inventing sketchy new products to induce consumers to sink themselves in infinite debt: ARM loans, obviously, but also still-riskier “mortgages” in which the “borrower” didn’t have to pay interest or principal. One lovely side note in Geoghegan’s account is the way in which he makes a famous movie villain—Lionel Barrymore’s Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life—look positively angelic in rel…

The New “Values Voters” Mantra

By Sarah Posner

…ontend, are not granted by either document, only recognized in them; these rights exist only because they were granted by God. That “endowed by the Creator” argument has been made repeatedly by Republican politicians in speeches lately, including Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich. That’s the new “values voters” rhetoric: government is a tyrant, disobedient to God. Sure, all the anti-gay, anti-abortion, and anti-secularism stuff i…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…el Hill. A good Northeastern liberal, I’d read the warning articles in The New Republic before I went, and I knew the Tea Party had taken over the state, but I could not have imagined something like the “bathroom bill,” or HB2. When I sat in Bell’s audience in Durham in March, the fallout from the state’s recent anti-LGBT legislation was just beginning. Still, I kept waiting for someone in the audience to ask: what do we do if it’s not our church…

New Pope Accused of Conspiring in Kidnapping

By Nicole Greenfield

…. You are the dictatorship!)—today became—“Bergoglio. Basura. Vos sos la dictadura.” Habemus Papam Franciscum! Check back (or sign up for the newsletter) for a more detailed profile of the new pope. …

The Sacred and the Dead: How an Iranian-Jewish Angeleno Discovered Her Tribe

By Saba Soomekh

…United States. This is where my story begins. It was 1978 and my parents knew they had to leave Iran. They knew that the country was no longer a safe place for them. Unlike Iranians who tried to leave post-’79, our emigration was not dramatic. We applied for a green card and immediately left. We knew we had to leave as soon as we could, so we left everything behind: our home, our business, our land, clothing—everything. We arrived with nothing mo…

The Uses and Abuses of the Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…d image of King within political discourse. As previously discussed on RD, American civic holidays, like the nation itself, are in a time of crisis. New holidays such as Juneteenth have been added to the federal holiday calendar, while others face renewed scrutiny and calls for abolishment. It seems one of the few holidays to pass through this era unscathed is the King holiday. Often, however, I’m forced to ask myself, “What does the King holiday…