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#WhoIsBurningBlackChurches: Is It Freedom Summer Again?

By Anthea Butler

…ed because of arson, lightning or other causes. Meanwhile, several African American female pastors in South Carolina have had threatening letters sent to them, stating, “You and your children will die.” When it comes to racism in America, and specifically acts of violence against black Christians and black churches, the past is not even the past—it is a very present danger. While academics might argue about the death of the black church, racists k…

Amazing Grace: Obama Hits a Blue Note in Charleston

By Peter Manseau

…very single syllable!” The “Amazing Grace” heard last week at the memorial service of Reverend Clementa Pinckney in Charleston was clearly part of the black church tradition. Barack Obama is no Al Green, but in the words of Questlove from the hiphop soul band The Roots, the president’s rendition included “the blackest blues note ever,” an echo of both the enduring significance of this English hymn to African American culture, and its apocryphal hi…

Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

By William E. Smith

…ns in the United States reveals something important. Even though almost no American Christians support it (outside of some smaller LDS sects that currently practice polygamy), there is no reason to think they could not come to do so, and to do so as rapidly as they did with same-sex marriage. One of the non-religious reasons these churches may embrace polygamy as they did same-sex marriage is that Americans, as a culture, may come to view polyamor…

Protesting the Pope’s (Not Yet Released) Environmental Encyclical? Check Your Doctrine

By Kevin M. Lowe

…f Catholic social teaching are intertwined, both Pope John Paul II and the American bishops included within their understanding of global ecology not only the intrinsic worth of nonhuman nature, but also social justice and this sense of a universal commonwealth. A Catholic environmental ethic, the American bishops said, needed at the same time to include attention to over-consumption, inequality, and poverty of all kinds. We can expect that Franci…

Lindsey Graham’s Lying “Eye-ranians”

By Haroon Moghul

…abber is a real word. Microsoft Word told me, and Microsoft Word is a real American, because Bill Gates is American. Those of you using iPhones, by the way, are probably Iranians and should be detained or deported. Because Steve Jobs was part Syrian, and Syria is part Iranian, which means your iPhone auto-correct is lying to you. Come to think of it, how do we know Lindsey Graham is not lying to us? How do we know Lindsey Graham’s not an Iranian?…

Jews Violate Their Own Beliefs, Conservative Christians Say

By Evan Derkacz

…igotry. What is bigotry is opening a business and then denying some people service on the basis of their identities. Second, as members of a minority religion, American Jews have long enjoyed constitutional protection from the Christian majority, which has sought to compel Jews to say Christian prayers, yield to Christian holy symbols in civic spaces, and conform to all sorts of Christian religious practices. To twist the meaning of “religious lib…

U.S. Christianity is Dead, Long Live U.S. Christianity

By Richard Flory

…orts) is what these religious identities mean as measured by attendance at services or participation in religious community. In other words, do people who say they are Baptist or Catholic actually attend services and participate in the life of any faith community? Is religion really a part of their everyday lives, or is it just an identity marker? We know from other research that attendance at religious services has been declining for decades, mos…

Competitive Religious Philanthropy in the Wake of the Nepali Earthquake

By Nalika Gajaweera

…rrying proselytizing intentions. The statement by the diaspora-based Hindu American Foundation is grounded in these sub-continental concerns. In studying Buddhist NGOs doing relief work after the Tsunami and the civil war in Sri Lanka, I found Buddhist groups mobilizing in “competitive philanthropy,” as I called it in my dissertation. These groups delivered medical, educational and welfare development programs to the rural poor in predominantly Bu…

Ben Carson’s Flat Tax Gets the Bible Wrong

By Sarah Posner

…of taxation—that people pay based on how much they would benefit from the service. That theory, though, has been dismissed in modern times because of the impossibility of determining such an allocation. Chodorow said that he was “deeply troubled” by the idea that a system developed thousands of years ago could be perceived as one that is “divinely ordained for all time and for all societies.” Rather than be true—if that’s possible—to biblical tit…

Women’s Equality in the Church is No Longer Negotiable

By Mary E. Hunt

…hority of the hierarchy (he said). The role of LCWR is to “undertake…those services which develop the life and mission of women religious in responding to the Gospel in the contemporary world” (she said). One begins to see the pattern. We see the same seesaw dynamic in the conference programs and speakers. We hear the women say that their choices “will be carried out in a prayerful, thoughtful and discerning manner.” The men’s rejoinder, that such…