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Attacks on Tim Walz’s Lutheran Denomination are Undermined by Reality — I Mean, Is ELCA Even Exciting Enough for Controversy?

By Daniel Schultz

…people to write their pronouns on their name tags. Mollie Hemingway, Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist, a right-wing publication with a history of promoting false information about the 2020 election, Covid-19, and climate change, showed no such restraint, proclaiming on Twitter: As a confessional Lutheran, I’m getting a lot of questions about Tim Walz possibly being Lutheran. FWIW, Walz is ELCA, an extremely left-wing sub-denomination. You may be…

What American Flag-Worship Looks Like to a New Citizen

By Rosalind C. Hughes

…dignified way, preferably by burning. On the campaign trail last year, then-candidate Trump borrowed the language of flag and religion to cast a utopian vision of America as “one people, under one God, saluting one American flag.” Baptist minister Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 as a ceremonial recitation for schoolchildren celebrating the 400thanniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. As Jeffrey Owen Jones writes: I…

The “Scandal” of the Catholic Vote

By Kate Childs Graham

…u strength and wisdom to meet the coming challenges…” – Letter to President-elect Barack Obama from Cardinal Francis George, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops And some celebrated the gains the Catholic Right achieved in stifling the rights of gay and lesbian people: “Were it not for Catholics, the institutions of marriage and the family would have taken a hit in places like Arizona, Florida and California. Indeed, in Fl…

Bin Laden’s Death Does Not Prove that Torture Works

By Sarah Sentilles

…ach in college classrooms about torture, some of my students who support US-sanctioned torture justify their position by insisting that torturing detainees is one way to “get even” for 9/11. Their reasoning mirrors that of some of the soldiers involved in the torture itself. In an article about his interview with former Guantánamo detainee David Hicks (author of Guantánamo: My Journey), Jason Leopold writes that Brandon Neely, a former Guantánamo…

The Islamists vs. The Markets: Egypt’s Election Analyzed

By Haroon Moghul

…social consensus around social welfare and mutual obligation than does the United States (don’t take the economic implications of right-wing too far). Nevertheless, perhaps unexpectedly, it is economic ideology that might give certain parties an edge, however distant these sympathies are from popular socialist demands, which seem these days to become less and less relevant to governments in power. It might be good for some Islamists in the short-t…

Racism and Anti-Semitism Are Not Intrusions of a Dark Past Into Our Present

By Joyce Dalsheim and Gregory Starrett

…it when we fail to acknowledge that the past lives through us as our taken-for-granted social and political structures relentlessly renew themselves in our everyday lives. How should we respond to the horrors of our own day and age, when quiet neighbors might suddenly reveal themselves to be hate-filled strangers with assault weapons, forcing their way into our houses of worship? “Arm yourselves!” some people say. Make sure there is a guard at th…

Guns, God and Government — The Coming of White Minority Rule?

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…io, internet message boards, Fox News, the emergence of social media, hyper-partisan politics, and a Reconstruction-style whitelash against the first Black president, a considerable portion of white Americans who’ve shifted further right on cultural and economic issues were primed for not just a candidate like Donald Trump, but for an all-out insurrection against the democratic norms of the American state. What racial resentment and economic uncer…

Islam in Conflict with Democracy? A Response to Stanley Fish

By David True

…ignores the differences between two very different religious cultures, the United States and Britain. The United States remains a proudly religious nation, while Britain is significantly more modest in its observance and public expression of religion. This much is bothersome as a wide range of culture warriors, from those who insist that this is a “Christian Nation” to those who believe that religion must be absolutely separate from politics, migh…

Trump Floated Dastardly Deal With Erdogan

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…A coup is by nature a secretive cabal carried out by a small number of high-ranking military and political leaders. Hundreds of high school principals and newspaper columnists are unlikely to have been in the inner circles of such conspiracies. They are, however, likely to have been Erdogan’s political opponents. In the years leading up to the coup, Erdogan lost the initial support of the Gulen movement as news of corruption within his administrat…

Meet the Christian Reconstructionists Behind the Latest Birther Theory

By Sarah Posner

…titution.” That concept, he insists (without proof), comes from Deuteromony 17: Deuteronomy 17 says you shall not take a king from anyone other than from your brethren. In other words, if you are the son of a father who is from Judah, and a mother who’s from Moab, you are not eligible to be king. Why? By the law of nature, when you are placed in a particular nation, it comes with a loyalty, a built-in loyalty to that nation. Look at how divided Ba…