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The Economy is Racism: Ending Race-Based Economic Violence is the Real Challenge of This Moment

…have been kept down at the very bottom in order for the American System of cheap labor to function. Although Henry Clay opposed slavery in theory, the need for this ongoing subjugation was most certainly in the mind of The Great Compromiser who coined the term “American System” during the expansionist years of ‘Indian removal’ and a related Second Middle Passage that took over one million people in shackles from the Chesapeake to the rich bottomla…

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Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

…fact practiced by some branch of Masonry. Dan Brown is able to work so comfortably with real Masonic symbols and lore because they resonate with his own sensibility. Not only do Brown and the Masons both love secrets and encoded symbols, but they believe that all of it must surely add up to some single great truth. It is a worldview that flourished in the Enlightenment, in which occult science and a deep sense of mystery surrounded the rise of mo…

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Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

…s, where “Gödel, Heisenberg, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics” rest comfortably beside “the basic goal of individuals and societies”—as well as, by implication, soldiers. The direct relevance of the scientific ideas to his point is questionable, but they constantly poke through, as kernels of the twentieth century’s metaphysical imagination. For Boyd, the legacy of these scientific ideas lends a habitable sense of order to his task, just as wh…

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

…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…

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Who’s to Blame for BP?

…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…

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Too Hot for Shul: Rabbis Seek Healthy Israel Dialogue After Gaza

…e for Peace, on whose Rabbinical Council he serves. (Compared to J Street’s 800-plus-member Rabbinic Cabinet, JVP’s two-year-old Rabbinic Council has just 50.) Rosen told me he was not forced out, but that his decision to step down was driven by “stress between individual congregants and me,” and was made “for my congregation’s well-being and my own well-being.” Rosen described Israel’s 2009 war in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, as the “breaking point…

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Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

…ovides services to homeless youth. “Simply hiding out in the safety and comfort of a place like Seattle is not Christian,” she says in reply to a question about why she would leave a gay-friendly city to spend two months visiting places that actively discriminate against queer folks. “Statistically,” she continues, “a third of homeless young people identify as gay, bisexual, or transgender. That’s the result in many cases of this message from some…

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Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

…ader. What was the culture of the prison? At night, there was one guard for 800 prisoners. In the Rio prison system there’s no real government presence; state control in the prisons is just a façade. The prison gangs are the most powerful presence, but the church exerts a strong influence too. There were about 400 inmates in the gang camp inside the prison, and 40 to 50 in the church camp. The rest were neutral people who kept to themselves in the…

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Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

…human being is obligated to say, ‘We ourselves, not our forebears only, go forth from slavery to freedom.’” Amazing!—not “every Jew,” it says: “Every human being!” In every generation. Including our own. Always before, we had chanted these passages and gone right on. Tonight we paused. Who and what is our oppressor? How and when shall we go forth to freedom? To my astonishment, these questions burned like a volcano within me, erupting like the vol…

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A Muslim Reflects on Christian Theologian (and UCLA Coach) John Wooden

…er of the amazing things about him. He was approachable, answering his own phone and mail, meeting with complete nobodies like me. I thanked him for the basketball lessons that I had learned from him, but more importantly for the life lessons. His beloved wife Nellie had passed away in 1985 after 53 years of marriage, and my wife had died suddenly in 1992. Coach gave me a powerful model for dealing with that loss, a reminder that those we loved we…

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