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The Prophet Amos on Unemployment and Our Leadership

By Peter Laarman

…ty, 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 it’s worse than that: the price Senate Republicans want to extract for helping the jobless includes extending an array of special tax breaks for business while slashing spending at a ran…

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

By Sarah Posner

…of wrong-doing. For example, if a pastor delivered a sermon and urged his flock to engage in illegal activities, law enforcement officials could investigate it.” But, Boston went on, “That doesn’t appear to be the case here. The targeted pastors are not even parties to the lawsuit, and the scope of the subpoenas is strikingly broad. This has the look of a fishing expedition. I’m not surprised that the pastors are resisting the subpoenas, and, ass…

Community Organizing and Symbolic Electioneering

By Laura R. Olson

…n media events. Most major decisions about the composition of presidential tickets — and even policy platforms — are made well before the speaker hits the rostrum. The delegates serve a largely symbolic role, and the speakers’ real audience is the electorate at large, following (or so both political parties hope) convention coverage at home on television and the Internet. Thus, the rhetoric that emerges from presidential nominating conventions sho…

The Trouble With Francis: Three Things That Worry Me

By Mary E. Hunt

…g—but nothing—has changed this year. 2. Women and Gays A second difficulty flows from the first, in that nothing has changed for women or LGBTIQ people with regard to Catholicism during the early months of this papacy. Nor is there much prospect on either issue given what the pope has said publicly. Regarding women’s ordination, Francis has been clear: “On the ordination of women, the Church has spoken and said no. Pope John Paul II, in a definiti…

New Film Chronicles Unlikely Friendship in Battle Over God and Guns

By Sarah Posner

…se 17 year-old son, Jordan Davis, was shot dead in 2012 at a Jacksonville, Florida gas station by Michael Dunn, a white man angry about loud music in a car occupied by unarmed black teenagers, came to share her story with an activist best known for his graphic protests outside abortion clinics. For each of them, that first encounter was charged with trepidation and fear. McBath, a Lutheran-turned-Pentecostal whose family has roots in the civil rig…

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

…hts activist says it is the conversation promoting the amendment that is inflaming homophobia. RFE/FL cites survey research saying more than 80 percent of Georgians have strongly negative attitudes toward homosexuality. Social research on homophobia in Georgia shows that attitudes toward gays are strongly influenced by traditional stigmas, taboos, and values promoted by the Georgian Orthodox Church. Those studies also show that psychological and p…

Niqab and Short Shorts

By Hussein Rashid

…of protest is to wear the niqab and nothing else. Then, the women will get tickets, not for being nude, but for being clothed. In my opinion, that would show the absolute absurdity of the state trying to control women’s dress. I have written elsewhere that this sort of action, of controlling a woman’s body, is simply male penis worship run amok. These ladies, who call themselves Niqabitches, have done a great service in showing the inherent contra…

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

By Elizabeth Drescher

…cumstances. In Western societies like Britain and the United States, the affluence of the powerful few, uninterested with religion as they happily are, shapes the norms of religious participation for the society as a whole. The effect is to minimize the role of religion as a social balm. That is, the United Kingdom, among the ten least religious nations in Diener’s study, is pretty much all out of opiates. Those who have don’t need them for happin…

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: …