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Gun Ownership as Sin—A Strategic, Secular Proposal for Gun Reform

By Ira Chernus

…when he sent the Great White Fleet—sixteen battleships armed with huge protruding guns—around the world to project American power. Both ventures expressed TR’s aim to imbue America with the rugged “manly” virtues that he learned as a cowboy and a lover of competitive sports. However TR was a paradoxical figure. He saw the “manly” virtues being eroded by an urbanizing, industrializing nation. And the dangers he saw there brought him into the camp o…

Michelle Shocked Show Shut Down After Anti-Gay Rant

By Kathryn Joyce

…she heard at her new church. He said he preaches the word of God—not his word, the word of God. And the word of God says that homosexuality is a sin. So I went away, and I made a decision. I could be turned off—driven away once again by narrow-minded bigots from the one hope that I have in my life for salvation. Or I could take what’s good—what I can use—and leave the rest. And that was a decision I made… There are some inconvenient truths now t…

Federal Court Overturns California’s Prop. 8

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…Prop. 8 supporters threw out every argument they could think of to defeat marriage rights for gays and lesbians, and each one of them from procreation to religious liberty to the special rights of heterosexuals to claim the word “marriage,” have been ruled as irrelevant. As the case heads to the conservative leaning Supreme Court, though, another Groucho Marx line comes to mind: “I have nothing but confidence in you. And very little of that.”…

Rick Warren’s Illiteracy Problem

By Paul Wallace

…isting that “Americans are biblically illiterate. They just don’t know the Word of God… Our parents’ generation knew the Word of God pretty well. My generation knew a little bit. The next generation knows none of it.” He may be right. Over the last several years it has become clear that American Christians know little about the Bible, and in 2010 Pew study atheists and agnostics performed better on a test of basic biblical knowledge than did Chris…

A Third Reconstruction? Rev. William Barber Lifts the Trumpet

By Peter Laarman

…omen and gay people. He objects, passionately, to the appropriation of the word “evangelical” for a worldview that is utterly devoid of prophetic critique. He reminds us, eloquently, about the important historical linkages between American evangelicalism and social regeneration: abolition, temperance, women’s rights and labor rights. Barber gives us good insights into how First Reconstruction fusion politics actually held on in North Carolina for…

Reality as Revelation: “Hail Caesar!” is the Coen Brothers’ Most Religious Movie Yet

By Elijah Siegler

…, Clooney is delivering a big speech in character and he stumbles over one word. The word that has been switched out? “Passion.” The word he forgets? “Faith.” Moments like this appear in most of their 17 films, but they go by so fast, that for years the debate was whether the Coens had any serious background or interest in religion at all. Certainly it was there in their movies—but was religion just one more element in their ironic postmodern mix…

Body of Work: Remembering Daniel Berrigan, 1921-2016

By Michele Somerville

…ut his body where his mouth was. Berrigan embodied the idea(l) of the “the word made flesh,” or in theology-speak: “living incarnationally.” The first veil-free nun I knew was my seventh-grade English teacher in a parochial school in Yonkers. She was young, smart, confident, opinionated and taught all the things she was supposed to teach. I learned what a predicate nominative was that year, and that year I also began to read newspaper pieces, for…

Manufactured Outrage Over ‘Godless’ Democratic Platform [UPDATE]

By Peter Montgomery

…to references in several speakers’ remarks. But that is not enough for the word-counters at Fox News, who demand to know why the number of uses of “God” has dropped. In response, Sen. Dick Durbin took on the insinuation that the platform revision somehow proved that Democrats are anti-God: Well, I can just basically tell you that if the narrative that is being presented on your station and through your channel and your network is that Democrats ar…

Defining “Cult,” Defining “Christian”

By Joseph Laycock

…with Chris Matthews was his refusal to give any definition—either for the word “cult” or the word “Christian.” When Matthews recited Webster’s definition of a cult, Jeffress responded, “I believe more in a theological cult.” “Theological” in this case, appears to mean that it is entirely the prerogative of Protestant leaders what is and is not a cult. The power of this category lies solely in the fact that it is never defined. Curiously, Jeffress…

Decoding Rick Warren’s Appreciation for Chick-fil-A

By Elizabeth Drescher

…You cannot possibly ‘hate’ him,” she would insist. “Hate” was a big-ticket word not to be squandered on annoying siblings or corrupt politicians. My mother’s semantic ethics on this point have stayed with me throughout my life, so I’ve never been one to throw around words like “hate,” “hater,” or “hate speech” casually. Words are of course powerful things, filled with the potential for hurt and shame that can linger for years, poisoning souls and…