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The Prophet Amos on Unemployment and Our Leadership

By Peter Laarman

…can’t find any job; among younger males, especially African-Americans, the number is much higher—in many areas one in two workers is without work. Yet Congress, with a Democratic majority, can’t get it together to extend unemployment benefits. Our solons just flew out of town for a weeklong holiday vacation. Republicans, joined by Democratic deficit hawks, insist that any extension be “deficit neutral” and come out of unspent stimulus money. But…

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

By Sarah Posner

…tent with his or her gender identity. After the city attorney ruled that many of the signatures collected for the referendum petition were invalid, the petitioners no longer had the requisite number of signatures to place the referendum on the ballot. The subpoenas, served on pastors who are not litigants in the lawsuit, seek a broad range of documents and communications, including sermons, regarding their statements on homosexuality, the Houston…

Community Organizing and Symbolic Electioneering

By Laura R. Olson

…based community organizing is neither a new phenomenon nor a rare one, so any discussion of faith-based social service delivery by either political party must include community organizers. Saul Alinsky initiated the idea of faith-based community organizing in the 1930s, challenging people in impoverished urban areas to address their neighborhoods’ various socioeconomic and crime-related challenges themselves — in partnership with local religious l…

The Trouble With Francis: Three Things That Worry Me

By Mary E. Hunt

…l church, beginning in Rome, owes reparations? I do not see signs of them anywhere, nor do I expect to any time soon. Opus Dei is not a clothing line, but a deeply ideological Catholic group that stands for very conservative religious values. Rachel Maddow was not tapped for the media job for a reason. Granted nine months is a short gestation even for a newbie pope. But waiting quickly becomes complicity when there is so much at stake—so many live…

New Film Chronicles Unlikely Friendship in Battle Over God and Guns

By Sarah Posner

…hat Jesus decided to submit to the will of God.” McBath, he said, “is in many ways an angel sent from God to communicate that message to me in a way that would bring about God’s will. So this gets terribly religious in the telling, but at its deepest level, that’s what’s occurring here.” For McBath, obeying the will of God on this issue emerged from an eight-week experience between “the heavenly plane and the earthly plane” after Jordan’s death, d…

What Will Orthodox ‘Republicanity’ Look Like?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…that Democrats need to get better at telling stories than at crunching the numbers, in this battle of the budget, the numbers actually matter. Hell, it’s a fight about numbers. And balance. And the virtue of justice. What this latest budget battle, and the question of raising the debt ceiling, and the straw polls are revealing, is just how Tertullian a wing of the Republican Party has become. It not only offers absurd arguments with a straight fac…

Orthodox TV Channel Offers Gays One-Way Ticket Out of Russia; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…se studies also show that psychological and physical violence often accompany widespread homophobia that is backed by traditional ideologies and a Soviet legacy of condemnation. Gays in Georgia also often face domestic violence within their own families when they reveal their homosexuality. Georgia and its Orthodox Church hosted 2016’s World Congress of Families global summit of social conservative activists; the date was picked to coincide with a…

Niqab and Short Shorts

By Hussein Rashid

…absurdity of the French burqa ban. I love the idea because it raises so many questions. Women who are supposedly being objectified by the men in their lives are told they will be “liberated” by going uncovered. But what about women who are objectified and feel they need to act as sexual objects by the men in their lives? Do they not deserve the protection of the state? Or is objectification acceptable as long as it is for the pleasure of the men…

London Calling: “Our Great War Is a Spiritual War”

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ciated with inequitable distribution of education, opportunity, and the shiny stuff that goes with ill-gotten wealth continues to incite tightly twined spiritual and political outrage. When such outrage spills into the streets, the enduring tradition has been to brand dissenters as villains, hooligans, and rioters regardless of their actual participation in any violent action and without consideration of underlying causes that may not justify but…

Romney to Talk Mormonism Tonight: Risky?

By Sarah Posner

…Back from my Bloggingheads hiatus, I talk with Get Religion’s Mollie Hemingway about whether Mitt Romney’s plan to discuss his Mormonism tonight at the Republican National Convention benefit his candidacy: And we also discussed the significance of the fact that Barack Obama is the only Protestant on both presidential tickets: …