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Community Organizing and Symbolic Electioneering

…uth side of Chicago, arguably as one point of light among Bush’s thousand. Today, faith-based community organizing has spread beyond large urban areas to small cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Critics charge that some faith-based community organizers are too radical. To be sure, community organizing is a confrontational activity; Alinsky intended it to be. Faith-based community organizers frequently prod local governments to address the complex c…

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Houston’s Pastor Subpoenas: A Meme Made for Fox News

…than has been reported, I think they might be successful.” Parker signaled today that she was surprised by the breadth of the subpoenas and suggested that they may be narrowed. According to the Wall Street Journal, the mayor’s spokesperson said in a statement: Mayor Parker agrees with those who are concerned about the city legal department’s subpoenas for pastor’s sermons. The subpoenas were issued by pro bono attorneys helping the city prepare fo…

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More Pressure on Obama to Fix His Religious Freedom Legacy

…Vision Memo, has thus attracted a larger coalition. Organizations signing today’s letter include Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union, a number of Christian Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, secular, and atheist groups, as well as legal advocates, abortion rights advocates, and LGBT groups. According to the letter, the World Vision Memo is based “on flawed legal analysis and wrongly asserts that R…

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Evangelicals Clutching Pearls Over Student Debt Relief: Lord Have Mercy!

…debt peonage in his time and place. Stefani McDade begins her Christianity Today roundup of evangelical responses by reporting on the top four Bible verses being cited by online Christian commentators in response to Biden’s move. The top four verses popping up on her screen were all from the Hebrew Bible—or the Old Testament as CT prefers to call it. Then McDade cites the reactions of three guys. The first, an Anglican priest from Indiana, is all…

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Mormons’ Puzzling Indifference to Easter

…irst Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. And that’s today.” The elders rolled their eyes at each other. “Where’d you hear that?” one asked. “My Chaucer class,” I said. “The early Christians put Easter as close as possible to a full moon so people could still have light at night to go on pilgrimage.” (FYI: a literature degree can be very useful in writing about religion, and vice versa.) They laughed. “Sister Welker, that may…

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Evangelical Groundhog Day: The ‘Times’ Identifies the ‘Religious Fervor in the American Right’ — Around Four Decades Late

…capitalism and the military industrial complex and bore no resemblance to today’s praise songs. What did my friends and I do when we saw the photo of Jerry Falwell? We laughed. He seemed a buffoon, and we couldn’t believe that anyone would ever take him seriously. We had no idea what lay ahead. This all came back to me because of another article in the New York Times—a piece published on April 6—“The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right…

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Swimming Against the Tide: Religious (Non) Affiliation Might Not Mean What You Think It Means

…Such changes in declared identification have huge implications for society today. And yet the import and meaning of these changes are likely more nuanced than how they often are portrayed. A mouse pad decorated with a school of ancient “ichthus” Christian symbols (and a contemporary “evangellyfish” headed in the opposite direction). Image via Zazzle.com. A few examples: Self-reported church attendance is roughly the same today as in the 1940’s and…

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How “Gratitude” Underwrites Inequality, Power, and Exclusion

…rket. But it does seem that the two opposing traditions have come together today to act as a powerful rhetoric of gratitude as indebtedness. Today we have a thriving self-help industry that churns out a steady stream of books on pop psychology, happiness, and gratitude. How well do these grapple with the issues you’ve raised? I was a little surprised by how little attention is paid to the history of gratitude in the self-help literature. I see my…

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How Not to Oppose the National Day of Prayer

…U.S.C. § 119 from law. But this year the American Humanist Association is promoting an opposition effort that is fundamentally misguided. Rather than call for its elimination, the AHA wants the annual observance to be replaced by a new “National Day of Reason.” According to its official website, a National Day of Reason would, of course, “celebrate reason,” but it would also “raise public awareness about the persistent threat to religious liberty…

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The People’s Temple, the Black Church, and the Tragic Legacy of Jonestown

…tifying as African-American. He was the first white person in the state of Indiana to adopt a black child. He always had people of color around him in the early days, and he was quite vocal about pushing back against Jim Crow ideology. He was an orderly in a hospital that refused to treat black patients, and he protested against that. He also desegregated several theaters in Indianapolis. He was also very much opposed by the white Pentecostal powe…

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