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Note to CPAC Conservatives: “City [Up]on a Hill” Wasn’t About American Exceptionalism

By Julie Ingersoll

…others more important than our own superfluous abundance. So what of that City [up]on a Hill? Is it like stage from which everyone can see us? A place of honor? A Pedestal? Frankly the Puritans would have considered that idolatrous hubris. Winthrop meant that, as representatives of the Christian faith, the rest of the world would judge Christianity (and even God) by whether or not they lived up to this commitment. For we must consider that we sha…

The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

By Kaya Oakes

…omething-year-old Deadhead guys hit on my teenage friends by offering them tickets to shows. Deadheads were anathema to my chosen subculture of socially conscious punks. East Bay punks were aggro and in your face about social justice, feminism, human rights; Deadheads, in our eyes, were too stoned and obsessed with their god Jerry to care. Sometimes, I’d be out in Berkeley at night, coming out of a punk show in some basement or garage, and I’d hea…

“What Kind of Islam Is That?”: Talking With Refugees From ISIS

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…concrete slabs and illegally tapped into an adjacent power line for electricity. They dug into the ground and connected to the city’s water supply to have drinking water and dug a pit for a latrine. With television and a refrigerator, they managed to create a viable living space. The residents of Erbil were remarkably tolerant—sympathetic, really—to the situation of such impromptu refugee camps, and the refugees in vacant lots received hand-outs a…

Gambian Leaders Portray Anti-Gay Law as Defense of Islam, Ugandan Politicians as ‘Christmas Gift’; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…federal identification document. The couple and their supporters said the city’s position was simply the latest example of the city’s unwillingness to perform a same-sex ceremony, and making demands that are not required of heterosexual couples. Kyrgyzstan: United Nations Human Rights Officials Urge Against Anti-Gay Bill The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has urged the government of Kyrgyzstan not to adopt the ant…

Death in the Desert: Riding With the Samaritans

By Lauri Lebo

…grants from their homes. They are pulled to the U.S. because of demand for cheap labor. One of the major pushes came in the ’90s with the passage of NAFTA, which opened the door to many agri-businesses to move farms down to Mexico, putting small farmers out of business. And while the number of undocumented border crossers is down, Brother David says, it will be virtually impossible to eliminate them as long as the opportunities for jobs exist. As…

The Curious Case of Mormons and LGBT Rights

By Alan Michael Williams

…mple, in the summer of 2012, Mormons marched in Pride parades in Salt Lake City, Boise, and other cities for the first time in large numbers, carrying banners that read “Mormons Building Bridges” (MBB). Donning Sunday attire and holding signs with messages of love, MBB forbade signs that criticized Church teachings—namely the notion that same-sex intimacy is a sin. Erika Munson, the founder of MBB, has assured me that the marches were a grassroots…

How Not to Support Obamacare

By Peter Laarman

…ttle-discussed provision of the ACA, hospitals that serve disproportionate numbers of the urban poor are losing their subsidies. But for Obama not to stand his ground and say that the cheap, low-level policies that many healthy people now have should be cancelled for the sake of the common good: that’s just inexcusable. On the other hand, he’s not getting a lot of help from his Democratic “friends” on this one, and for the same reason: They likewi…

Memo to David Brooks: Francis Is Not Naïve For Criticizing Capitalism

By Peter Laarman

…credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign energy sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or perhap…

Updated: My Work on Confederate Monuments Leaves This Christian Ethicist Distrustful of Calls for Reconciliation and Healing

By Ryan Andrew Newson

…ry process of truth-telling and the material righting of wrongs. Rather, a cheap reconciliation was rendered, which served—at the beginning of Jim Crow, no less—to hide our continued animosities from ourselves, rejecting one of the major opportunities this nation has had to face what Eddie Glaude, following James Baldwin, calls “the lie.” It is now relatively well-known that most Confederate monuments were constructed at the height of lynching and…

Who’s to Blame for BP?

By David True

…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…