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By the Way: Obama and Faith-Based Initiatives

By Randall Balmer

…can society. I don’t pretend to be a First Amendment scholar, but it has always seemed to me that there was no constitutional problem with the faith-based initiative proposal on the face of it. However, I’ve worried for a long time that there was potential for a great deal of mischief, as has been borne out by the Bush administration’s handling of faith-based grants. In other words, I find no problem with having religious organizations administer…

Egypt Goes After Gays to Silence Islamist Critics; South Africa’s ‘Open Mosque’ is Closed; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…zed for recent attacks on marriage equality legislation that some see as a way to position himself for a return to politics: In a 45-minute prime-time TV interview, Sarkozy, The Guardianreports, “became animated at the end of the interview when asked about the Socialist government’s so-called ‘marriage for all’ legislation that legalised same-sex unions and brought hundreds of thousands of mostly rightwing, traditional, Catholic protesters on to t…

The Gospel Gestalt: From Joyful Noise to Whitney Houston

By Douglas Harrison

…hoir wins the competition. Thank Gawd for white people! Yet viewed another way, the movie manages, however blunderingly, something like a post-racial take on the way matters of race, class, geography, and religion get mediated through gospel music (and I’d say these even if I weren’t a lifelong fan of Dolly Parton and an adherent to the purity-in-artifice approach to the Parton aesthetic around which the film is organized). Ultimately Vi comes to…

Repurposing the Gospel Aura: Eminem’s Chrysler Ad Borrows Some Spirit

By Douglas Harrison

…ilm Angels In America (2003), in which a fabulous drag queen, backed by a swaying, enrobed, and equally fabulous black gospel choir, memorializes a gay man who has died of AIDS with a rousing performance of Zella Price Jackson’s exuberant “I’m His Child.” Here, the effect of the black gospel choral style is to implicitly link the gay-male social struggle against homophobia with the soul in bondage striving after the salvation of freedom in the Civ…

White Nationalist Ideology Shines Through at Elite MAGA Conference: Inside NatCon Part II

By Ben Lorber

…rence here is ethnicity—or race, if you will… races differ in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ.” In 2013, Richwine lost his research position at the Heritage Foundation when a Washington Post investigation revealed that his racist doctoral dissertation, “IQ and Immigration Policy,” had made assertions like “the average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native populati…

Satire is Religion

By Austin Dacey

…piritual search for religious truth has not been against blasphemy, but by way of blasphemy. Depending on where we sit metaphysically, we may want that search called off, or we may want it furthered. Either way, we must welcome religious offense as the unavoidable consequence of a free religious conscience. This is nowhere more urgent than in those parts of the world where charges of blasphemy are still used to violate freedom of religious conscie…

A desolate road in Israel lined with security fencing.

Decadence, Sickness, and Death: Mourning and the Israel-Hamas War

By Shaul Magid

…equivalence to suggest (nor is it blasphemous to imply), that in different ways, very different ways, this is true of both sides of the conflict. The head of the IDF stated that “Gaza will never be the same.” What they did not state, but which is equally true, is that Israel will never be the same. I do not argue that both are in crisis in order to draw equivalence where there is none, but to try to interrogate some of the contours of both sides u…

Power in a Union: How the Working Class Shaped Religion in America

By Matthew Pehl

…Piss them off? I am most invigorated by books that challenge or change the way I think by giving me a new “lens” through which to view the world. I hope readers will have that experience with my book, especially regarding the way they think about what religion is and how it actually operates in people’s lives. What alternative title would you give the book? Originally, I was very attached to Power in the Blood. I liked this title because it evoked…

Patriotism and Piety—Not For Conservatives Only

By Ira Chernus

…his nexus to the right. Instead, we should recognize that there is a right way and wrong way to do it, insist that it be done the right way, and get to work. Of course many liberals already do. And there lies the good news. The United States has a rich heritage of liberal (and even radical) political views being promoted by religious people and congregations. Millions of Americans seek sanctity in their lives, humble themselves before a higher pow…

Proof-Texting at the Sugar Bowl: Tebow’s Big Finale

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…FL? Many reasons were enunciated. He has grown used to being dominant in a way that no athlete in the NFL can be (in other words, we cannot “do all things”). His passing delivery has always been slow to develop and easy to read, so defenders will find him easy to disarm and to intercept (in other words, his passing is more prose than poetry). And so on. I could not help but wonder if a subtle sub-text in this Friday night commentary about Tebow’s…