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Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…ader. What was the culture of the prison? At night, there was one guard for 800 prisoners. In the Rio prison system there’s no real government presence; state control in the prisons is just a façade. The prison gangs are the most powerful presence, but the church exerts a strong influence too. There were about 400 inmates in the gang camp inside the prison, and 40 to 50 in the church camp. The rest were neutral people who kept to themselves in the…

A Muslim Reflects on Christian Theologian (and UCLA Coach) John Wooden

By Amir Hussain

…er of the amazing things about him. He was approachable, answering his own phone and mail, meeting with complete nobodies like me. I thanked him for the basketball lessons that I had learned from him, but more importantly for the life lessons. His beloved wife Nellie had passed away in 1985 after 53 years of marriage, and my wife had died suddenly in 1992. Coach gave me a powerful model for dealing with that loss, a reminder that those we loved we…

Why Crux‘s Knights of Columbus “Partnership” is Problematic

By Kaya Oakes

…mpaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. In 2005, they printed 800,000 postcards in Canada “in a campaign that [argued] that the redefinition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would promote pedophilia, pornography and unsafe sex.” As Marianne Duddy-Burke of the LGBTQ Catholic organization Dignity USA commented in a press release, “The Knights are deeply invested in advancing a particular brand of Catholicism, and I am con…

Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

By Arthur Waskow

…tian radical A. J. Muste calling Moses the organizer of “Brickmakers Union Number 1” and a pacifist Russian rabbi named Tamaret—wove them all into a new Telling of the tale of freedom. In that Telling, the then ongoing, even now unfinished, struggle of Black America for freedom was interwoven with the ancient story of the Israelites’ struggle to end their slavery under Pharaoh. Where the old Haggadah had what seemed to me a silly argument about ho…

Too Hot for Shul: Rabbis Seek Healthy Israel Dialogue After Gaza

By Sarah Posner

…the necessity for Israel to protect its civilian population against Hamas rocket fire from Gaza. Many of these rabbis emphasized the rejection of binaries, shifting the conversation from an assessment of Israel’s justifications for going to war to a conversation about the ability to hold two seemingly conflicting ideas in one’s head at once. “People seem to believe that if you really support Israel, there’s no heartspace to grieve civilian deaths…

Hajj Journal: M & M

By Amina Wadud

…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…

Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…cohorts would mostly succeed. But I’m also looking for my students to do a little reflection on their own assumptions about what religion is and does, to do a little research, and to think about the variety of ways religion has been described, defined, defended, and derided through the ages. Here begins the downturn of their GPA. On the first day of class I provide my students with a ten-page list of brief definitions of religion assembled by my h…

“Little Sisters” Being Sold As Face of Contraception Case

By Patricia Miller

…elieve it is immoral. And in case you forgot, she also reminds us that the Little Sisters “take the vows to become Little Sisters of the Poor do so out of deep love and religious conviction,” and that they “spend our days caring for, learning from, and serving those whom many in our society would prefer to forget.” So, apparently, if you want to turn a lot of poor, elderly people out on the street, you have to allow the Little Sisters to refuse to…

How the “Little Sisters” Won by Losing “Religious Liberty” Case

By Patricia Miller

…e Care Act’s contraceptive mandate could be forgiven for thinking that the Little Sisters lost: Denver’s Little Sisters of the Poor Loses Contraception Coverage Ruling Little Sisters of the Poor Lose Case Against Birth Control Mandate Denver Court Rules Against Little Sisters of the Poor in Contraception Coverage Case But nothing could be further from the truth. The Little Sisters of the Poor, or more precisely, the Becket Fund, the conservative p…

Google’s Benevolent Interfaith Big Tent

By Lucia Hulsether

…the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that Googl…