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“Religion, O Diabolic”: Lamenting Religious Violence, Then and Now

By Ed Simon

…cularism: the religion of liberty, equality, and fraternity. These are the best of those French values, attacked this weekend. To paraphrase an American poet, there is nothing wrong with France that what’s right with France can’t fix. There is no figure that better embodies the French character than Montaigne, the writer who in many ways invented the modern person. A Catholic, he was horrified by the terror enacted in the Paris massacres. For him…

Right Wing Christians and Radical Feminists Form an Odd (Transphobic) Couple

By Sunnivie Brydum

…ly rejected the claim that allowing trans folks to use the facilities that best match their gender identity leads to any increase in reports of harassment or assault in such spaces. It just doesn’t work that way. In fact, if anyone has anything to fear it should be transgender people since they’re actually more likely than their cisgender peers to be harassed and assaulted in sex-segregated spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms. And with high-pro…

Come Hell or High Water: How the Melodrama of Disaster Leaves Us Vulnerable

By Noah Berlatsky

…ublic forgets quickly, which means that there’s little incentive to create best practice plans and mechanisms for reducing the scale of disasters, since by election time no one is likely to remember. “Voters reward the delivery of disaster relief, but not investments in disaster preparedness,” the authors bleakly conclude. The problem is that most of us see disaster, and disaster response, through a narrative of melodrama. Melodrama is known for e…

“Islam Is Not a Religion”

By Julie Ingersoll

…n the world, cannot resort to debating which interpretation of the text is best, as though the texts exist independent of the people who read them. So Islam can be violent, and so can Christianity. Thankfully other Muslims and Christians want to say that those folks are not “really Muslim,” or “really Christian.” But if all we have is that which scholars call “insider discourse,” then conversations across religious divides become, at worst, dising…

Country Music Minus the Culture Wars: A Lesson from a Legend

By Paul Harvey

…and established emissary posts there). Historically, Southern music at its best—the bluesmen, the Carter family, Charlie Poole, and the corpus of the old, weird America—simply could not be tied down to any particular political message or program. This music was about a world beyond one’s control. Its occasional bromides or homilies were not nearly as convincing as its unforgettable portrayals of the darker difficulties of survival in a harsh and u…

Khalifah: We Really Do Have Control Over Our Own Destiny

By Amina Wadud

…believe we live this life according to our own will and trust in the Lord. I just don’t get the idea that unless I get a specific, personal, one-on-one message, then I cannot do the best I can with what God has given me. But then, as all the great Muslim thinkers conclude at the end of their writings: Allah knows best….

Why Tony Campolo’s LGBTQ Reversal is Evangelicalism’s Tipping Point

By Cathleen Falsani

…world and has been for close to 60 years. Both Campolo and Graham, 96, are best known and beloved first and foremost as preachers largely unencumbered by overt denominational or political biases. Like Graham, Campolo also has been a spiritual counselor to U.S. presidents and has played the role of public pastor in times of national sorrow and joy. (Since I first heard him deliver a version of it during chapel when I was a student at Wheaton Colleg…

Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

By Haroon Moghul

…justification for annual “slave raids” to replenish and even increase the number, in direct opposition to Muhammad’s actions. Tremendous abuses existed for centuries. Centuries. Worse, many scholars endorsed (or at least condoned) them. That’s unfortunate, but not exceptional. Many Christians used the Bible to endorse, justify and defend their wars on behalf of slavery, even as we would find it hard to believe Jesus would be comfortable with plan…

An Interview with Rep. Jamie Raskin on the Feminist and Abolitionist Founder Who Has Slipped into a Memory Hole

By Andrew L. Seidel

…One of the brilliant themes in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton—whose closing number is “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”—concerns the stories we as a nation tell about our Founders, something Raskin invokes. “The absence of a Paine memorial in Washington is a real problem in our political culture. So much of the pop culture debate today is a fight between the fans of Hamilton and Jefferson.” Hamilton’s “scrappy biography” has been so crea…

Studying Religion is Suddenly Popular

By Mark Hulsether

…t leaves a nasty aftertaste. I prefer an image of struggle to build on the best legacies from the roots of Religious Studies in a current era when these legacies could easily collapse due to the dual dynamic of (wholly appropriate) efforts to diversify and (scandalous) corporate downsizing. This dual challenge now spreads many Religion programs precariously thin. Newsweek’s stress on “do-gooders” is also worrisome. True, Religious Studies is often…