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The Year in Religion: A Ray of Hope Amid the Usual Fecklessness

…t also an absolute and joy-filled conviction that God is driving the Black freedom struggle forward despite it all. Today, as in King’s day, there is widespread dereliction of duty among the self-proclaimed faithful, but there is also a rising righteous remnant. There are hundreds of younger activists out there, primarily activists of color and many of them queer, who are walking courageously in faith even though they will tell you clearly and con…

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The Women’s March, Anti-Semitism, and ‘The Jewish Farrakhan’

…as Engel argued, it’s simply what’s determined by “social agreement”; and today the social agreement seems to be that BDS or anti-Israelism is antisemitism. Showing solidarity with Jews in America, or donating money to help a community after an antisemitic act, is thus interpreted as if it is by definition insincere at best, trickery at worst. Acknowledging the good the NOI has done in helping single Black women and incarcerated Black men doesn’t…

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Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

…ikened to “Oriental,” “Asiatic,” “Turkish,” and “Mohammedan” peoples. Even today, more than 120 years after the prophet Wilford Woodruff officially disavowed the practice of polygamy, the media routinely conflates the LDS Church with Mormon fundamentalists (more properly called fundamentalist believers in late-period Joseph Smith). In this historical context, The Book of Mormon is light, sweet stuff. It demonstrates the attenuation of anti-Mormoni…

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Everything You Think You Know About the Dark Ages is Wrong

…He devised an abacus, or counting board, that mimics the algorithms we use today for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. It has been called the first counting device in Europe to function digitally—even the first computer. In a chronology of computer history, Gerbert’s abacus is one of only four innovations mentioned between 3000 BC and the invention of the slide rule in 1622.   Like a modern scientist, Gerbert questioned authority. He…

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Fear, Guns, and the (Unwinnable) War Against Death: A Letter to My Fellow Americans

…ore. More than that, the nature of everyday life for most of us in America today is deadly for the world around us. The machines that facilitate our daily life exploit the fossil fuel spoils of the underworld, slowly turning the planet into a kind of living hell. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose knew that, even if many of us choose to ignore that it’s happening; phenomena like mass species extinctions are affecting us deeply. Rose argued that in t…

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A Jewish Perspective on Reparations

…e ought to manifest as a responsibility to align with those most oppressed today, wherever we stand. As American Jews, we have a unique obligation to support reparations for African Americans because so much of white America, addicted as it is to the fantasy of a post-racial era, does not appear ready to do so. And then the chasm between obligation and action. In our communal meeting centers and houses of worship, we wave the legacy of Jewish Free

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None Means None (Not Atheist, Agnostic, Unbeliever…)

…important, however, that we consider religious and nonreligious experience today in light of an emerging philosophical and practical in-between pointed to by the growth in the number of those who self-identify as religiously unaffiliated. Take the 36-year-old nonprofit director from Chicago who describes herself as “something like an atheist… most days.” She insists that being an unbeliever has no bearing on her almost daily prayer practice: Do I…

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6 Overlooked Takeaways From a Reviewer of Controversial Texas Textbooks

…Islam propaganda they will encounter from groups like TTT. 6. Get Involved Today’s public school students need to be prepared to function effectively not only in a global society that is already religiously diverse, but also in a United States that is growing more so. Since religions continue to shape human viewpoints and motivations, students need a solid grasp of the religions of the world. One thing I learned from participating in the 2014 text…

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Do Make Trouble: The Complex World of Radical Jewish ‘Revenge Theologian,’ Meir Kahane

…y reading them outside academia? The popular discussion about antisemitism today is sorely under-theorized. I just read an excellent new book, still in manuscript, by a young scholar on middle-brow Jewish writing in the mid 20th Century. One of the things she shows is that from 1945 to the early 1960s there were dozens of books written by rabbis and Jewish scholars about basic Judaism, such as Milton Steinberg’s Basic Judaism or Irving Howe’s Worl…

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Rep. Smith Suggests a New Protected Class: “Immaturity”

…xposure of abortion would spark a civil rights movement for fetuses. Smith today added some language that makes quite clear that he’s envisioning fetuses as a protected class, much like age, race, religion, gender, or disability. From his statement: [L]ast week, with full and unequivocal support of Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, more than 165 members of Congress joined Dan Lipinski and I [sic] to introduce the No Taxpayer Fu…

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