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The Revolujah! Will Be Performed: Reverend Billy’s Reality Joke

By Nathan Schneider

…on of performance and preaching. How would you characterize it? KL: At his best, Reverend Billy is the love child of Billy Graham and Allen Ginsberg. I think he, like many American activists, is invested in a sort of self-promoting iconoclasm in order to bring about greater equality. Like many American preachers, he invents a new consensus in his speech in order to develop the broadest base. And, like many in the avant-garde, he suggests his perso…

Why America’s Whitewashed Thanksgiving Needs to Go: A Short Study in the Power of White Christian Mythmaking

By Peter Laarman

…converted it into sugar and molasses died of horrific abuse in staggering numbers. These islands were perpetually hungry for more flesh. New arrivals, coming from North America in chains, were always welcome, and the grandee planters paid handsomely. But routinely selling captured natives to the islands was just the beginning for the North American settlers. The long-lived Roger Williams was barely in his grave before his Rhode Island colony was…

The “Southern Cage”: How the Myth of the Redemptive Depression Keeps Blacks at the Margins

By Eric C. Miller

…friendships with Mary McLeod Bethune and other black activists. Mallory visited the White House, and Eleanor Roosevelt supported her work—Anthea Butler has written a lot about these connections. So even as it bowed to white supremacy, the New Deal opened opportunities to black church leaders. White Southern clergy took note. Many—including Christian socialists and progressives—pushed the New Deal to do more. Methodist Will Alexander headed the Fa…

Hajj Journal: Makkah as the Most Romantic City

By Amina Wadud

…and over again. Imagine my thoughts about this reversed order, right? The best position for the man in hajj is behind the woman. It made sense that these guys would literally need to be instructed for such, because their normal way of thinking must be, me first. Yes, yes, our wives are equal, but we’re the standard bearers and she must follow our leads. But in the jostle, if the person is behind you, they are more likely to be separated by the cr…

The Trouble With Harry (Potter): Religious Conservatives Do Have Something to Fear

By Jay Michaelson

…ean here the unreconstructed monotheistic God) has no role whatsoever. The best man wins the duel—or rather, the man with the best wand. Now, one could, of course, make the same claims about comic-book sagas like Superman or Batman. Why should Harry Potter have to take any more refuge in the numinous than Kal-El or Bruce Wayne? Well, because there is something intrinsically religious about the Potter series; and I don’t just mean the rab…

Hajj Journal:
This Cultural Hajj

By Amina Wadud

…cided on the next best thing from then on: I would do what I thought would best enhance my experience of the hajj and I would stay away from the rest, opting for silence if somebody else’s culture got too close. The variance of different cultural Islams prevented the women in our tent from creating an immediate community for the days ahead. At one point, the group leader wanted to inform the men and women together about the rites of Mina, Arafat,…

Irony Thick in Bush Interview with Focus on the Family

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ng the hypocrisy of his words. Daly, similarly, did what he and Focus does best—not getting that the message they’re putting out starkly reveals their own hypocrisy. For example, Bush tells Daly: “I don’t believe you can lead by demonizing somebody. I believe you lead by convincing somebody,” he says. “And in my case, I was unable to convince (some people) on different issues. I understood that.” Here’s where tears of frustration begin. While Daly…

Huckabee Teams Up with Citizens United to Promote Fetal Personhood

By Sarah Posner

…onsibly peddles the falsehoods that abortion providers try to maximize the number of procedures they perform in order to profit, and that fetuses feel pain. The anti-choice activist Carol Everett claims she once worked for an abortion provider that aimed to perform three to five abortions on 13-18 year old girls so they would be accustomed to using abortion as a birth control method into adulthood. Dr. Laube called these claims “pure nonsense,” “p…

Unreleased Religious Freedom Manifesto Isn’t the Culture War Compromise It Hopes to Be

By Frederick Clarkson

…ghter of lambs when the military was in short supply of wool uniforms. The best modern example is laws against racial discrimination: While many people insisted that interracial dating or marriage violated their religion, the Supreme Court, in the 1983 case of Bob Jones University v. United States, rightly refused to grant an exemption to anti-discrimination laws based on religion.” With its claim that the “commitment” of the United States regardi…

Democratic Egypt Tests a Divided Israel

By Shaul Magid

…g; even if it may not serve our interests in the short run, it’s still the best alternative human beings have come up with. In this case, one can certainly understand Netanyahu’s concern; Mubarak is “the devil he knows.” But it’s often the case that autocratic rulers are easier to deal with since they typically answer to no one. Yet, while they appear more stable in the short run, more dictatorships have been overthrown by democratic movements tha…