Search for "breaking newstoday cleantalkorg2.ru bbc news Read Breaking News Today news today Politics Stock Market breaking newstoday"

Jewish Past/Israeli Future: A Review of The Invention of the Jewish People

By Shalom Goldman

…raeli policies is predetermined: they are bound to fail—both in the actual marketplace, and in the marketplace of ideas. Israel’s Fateful Hour, a 1984 book by Yehoshafat Harkabi, the head of Israeli Military Intelligence in the 1950s, warned of the dire consequences for Israel of the longterm occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The book found no audience in the United States. In that same Orwellian year, 1984, another book on Israel was publishe…

No to Church, Yes to Jesus?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ger cultural vocabulary. Nancy Ammerman’s study of what she termed “Golden Rule Christians”—practicing believers across Christian denominations and ideological spectrums who take the scriptural teaching that one should “do unto others as you would have them do to you” (Mt. 7:12) as the core Christian value—certainly tracks a similarly generalized Christian ethic. But I would suggest that the ethical perspective of those I might tag as “Good Samari…

What We Need to Understand is that Fascism is Intersectional and Erotic—’Thy Rod is Thy Gun,’ With a Hip-Thrust

By Annika Brockschmidt

…As a joke, I started a project with a colleague of mine for which I had to read this Trump romance novel. The series is called Maga Hat Romance. Then we do a feminist analysis of them in a podcast. [Googles it.] MAGA Hat Romance by Liberty Adams! Yes, exactly. And doesn’t the guy on the cover look just like [former GOP representative] Madison Cawthorn? I’m just seeing it—oooh wow. We read Christian romance novels to decipher what they convey about…

Jose Antonio Vargas’ Coming Out and the Power of Stories over Religious Remonstrances

By Sarah Posner

…United States will move you to tears — unless, that is, you have ice water running through your veins. You must read it; it’s quite possibly the most important and telling thing you will read about what America is in a long time. I just saw Vargas this past weekend at the Netroots Nation conference in Minneapolis. He moderated a panel, “Obama, the Tea Party and 2012: The Role of Race in Electoral Politics.” It wasn’t what you might expect from the…

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

By Nathan Schneider

…t. Have you encountered limits to your approach? SD: Sometimes the almost Fruedian anxiety provoked by the character interrupts the message—people who grew up in repressive religious environments tend to reject the figure outright. And who could blame them? On the other side, we feel the difficulty of a reflexive response amongst a certain kind of right-minded liberal who feels nervous that we will offend someone—not necessarily them, but someone….

Transgender, Scientologist, “Cult Hero”

By Jay Michaelson

…really a religion, either. There’s so much more in QAPD, but throughout it run themes of truth-telling and truth-avoidance, of ways to postpone the reality of one’s own difficult shadows, and of ways to admit and confront them. I can’t imagine the specifics of Bornstein’s dark places. Her gender evolution makes my own closet-to-light gay journey seem easy and banal, and her adventures in BDSM make my sex life look irredeemably vanilla. And I haven…

How New Religions Are Made

By Jacob S. Dorman

…ers reined me in, and I was left with the much more compact, and much more readable text as it stands today, which focuses on the period from the nineteenth century to the 1930s. Some scholars may wonder how large these groups were, especially since African American Protestantism is assumed to be so large and powerful. How do you respond to those searching to answer that ever-elusive problem of how “representative” these groups and leaders were? O…

Protesters in Washington DC, the day before the January 6 insurrection, wrapped in American flags blow shofars.

Netanyahu’s Genocidal Religious Rhetoric isn’t Just an Appeal to the Israeli Right — He Has Another Constituency in Mind

By Brock Bahler

…iven their history on the underside of colonization, when Native Americans read the Bible, they identify with the indigenous inhabitants of the land. As Warrior puts it, he reads the Bible “with Canaanite eyes.” What would it look like to unlearn a colonialist hermeneutic and read Scripture through the lens of the poor, the imprisoned, the oppressed? How about through the lens of the Israeli hostages? The Canaanites? The bombed and left-for-dead P…

Who Gets to Decide if Noah is Biblical?

By Annette Yoshiko Reed

…kened to the Church in both Christian literature and art, and even Noah’s drunkenness was construed in positive terms as pointing to the Eucharist. Aronofsky’s ambivalent Noah and emphasis on diluvian destruction have a long lineage, but so do critics’ rosier take on the Noah tale. Watching the Watchers While some, like Baden, begrudge their inclusion because they “have a good long pedigree,” some critics mock the inclusion of “Watchers” as furthe…

You’re Using It Wrong: Rachel Held Evans Returns to the Bible

By Eric C. Miller

…agar, I was influenced by Delores Williams and Wil Gafney, black women who read the story of Hagar in a way that I would never think to read it. Also some feminist theology, some liberation theology—I did my research for this book and I stand by it. You advocate a midrash approach to Biblical interpretation. What is that, and why is it preferable to literalist or inerrancy approaches? Midrash is a Jewish rabbinical interpretation of scripture. In…