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Bin Laden’s Death Does Not Prove that Torture Works

By Sarah Sentilles

…ssible because torture is not understood to be wrong by many people in the United States, and part of the reason for that is because no one has been punished for engaging in it. Officials are able to champion their use of torture—as Bush did in Decision Points—because no one in the Bush Administration has been held accountable for torturing or for authorizing torture despite the overwhelming evidence that they did so. There are some countries to w…

What Netanyahu Learned from Texas

By Sarah Posner

…Texas classrooms into training grounds for “biblical law” enthusiasts. The United States has a Constitution; nothing in it declares America is a Christian nation (or, in the Texas SBOE parlance a “Judeo-Christian nation”). Barton’s claims that the Constitution in fact codifies a “Christian nation” doesn’t make it so. In contrast, though, Israel does not yet have a constitution, and the bill declaring it the “nation-state of the Jewish people”—if p…

John Yoo and Jay Bybee Dodge Disciplinary Action but Recall Nuremberg

By Bruce Ledewitz

…the directives of the president cannot be prosecuted under the laws of the United States. It’s difficult to believe, as Margolis does, that Yoo didn’t understand that his views did not represent the law of the land. He is too smart to have been in the dark about the fact that his conclusions reflected only his specifically minority view. Nevertheless, even if we assume that Yoo recommended what he did in the good-faith belief that the president’s…

A New Book By Esteemed Sociologist Robert Wuthnow Struggles to Show ‘Why Religion is Good for American Democracy’

By Peter Laarman

…government. Studies of late twentieth-century legislative decisions in the United States did show—unsurprisingly—that they favored the interests of the wealthy. The studies did not demonstrate, however, that these decisions threatened democracy, just that they went against public opinion on certain issues such as estate taxes and support for a minimum wage. Again: Hunh?? And not a word here about Citizens United or about the rivers of dark money t…

It Is Time For American Orthodox Christians to Protest Russia’s Persecution of LGBT

By Katherine Kelaidis

…s to the far corners of the globe: Canada, South Africa, Australia and the United States. Thus Orthodoxy emerged in the United States as an immigrant church, the church of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, as well as Arabs—all of whom occupied the lower rungs of America’s all-important racial pecking order. Consequently, respectability and assimilation quickly became important goals of these communities. This longing for assimilation, if n…

2018: Wave Goodbye to Another Year in Religion

By Daniel Schultz

…est ISIS terrorists or other brown people break in while he’s asleep. “The United States is exclusively shaped by and for white Christians” is about right. By far the darkest religion story of the year, however, was an anti-Semite’s shooting rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the deadliest such attack in American history. It was an act of violence deeply rooted in America’s gun idolatry, one that was not so much the past come bac…

RDPulpit: You Lost the Debate

By Mary E. Hunt

…ut focus on such issues effectively obscures the bigger picture of why the United States has become a war-based economy, a bellicose nation, why more rather than fewer fronts are opening, why international diplomacy and international organizations like the United Nations and the World Court are not the places where 21st century citizens adjudicate their differences. At a time in world history when space travel is practically economy or business cl…

2021 National Prayer Breakfast: A Kinder Gentler Christian Capitalism

By Becky Garrison

…ralistic with nones representing the largest religious voting block in the United States. Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State opines, “While it was a relief this year not to see the breakfast descend into the kind of embarrassment it often was during the Trump years, that hardly means the event is worth saving. This year ought to be its last.” However, given President Biden’s endorsement by progressive faith leaders,…

Call For A Catholic Tea Party Movement Claims Bishops Conference Is Too Liberal

By Sarah Posner

…tupak for holding up health care reform over the abortion issue. Catholics United’s Chris Korzen condemned Hudson’s call for a Catholic tea party. “There’s clearly no place for lies, violence, and anti-government rhetoric in the Catholic Church,” he said. “Yet, that’s exactly what we’re going to have unless the Catholic Bishops start to denounce the tea party movement. Regrettably, we’ve seen exactly the opposite from them over the course of the p…

Rick Warren’s Biblical Blowback

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…d by troubling implication, the judgment is now to be directed against the United States, not against the Iranians. The bizarre implication of the way Warren reads his scriptures places the United States in the surreal position of being like the Amorites, the Amalekites, or worset—which is precisely what the so-called Enemies of Freedom are claiming that we have become. Behind all of these scriptural and theological confusions lies a still deeper…