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

By Amir Hussain

…high school, not becoming a jock until university. There, I developed and flourished as an athlete. To this day, one of the awards of which I am most proud was when I graduated from University College in 1987 as the best male athlete. As I tell my students at LMU, I don’t look like much now, being old and slow and fat, but I used to be somebody. When I moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1997 to start teaching at Cal State Northridge, I sought ou…

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

By Nick Street

…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…

Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

By Nick Street

…ge and across the street from a Church of Christ—is festooned with rainbow flags, and life-size cutouts of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell beckon customers to the hair salon that Schenck and Loyd run on the ground floor. How have the men fared in the two decades since they moved to Arkansas from New York? “We haven’t been shot at in two, maybe three years,” says Schenck, who was working as a bar-back in the Stonewall Inn on the day of the riots in…

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

By Arthur Waskow

…u’ve taken the story into our own hands, as the rabbis said God wanted the fleeing slaves themselves to do. Do you know that midrash? The one where God refuses to split the Red Sea until one activist has gone into the water, up to his nose, about to drown?” “What’s a midrash?” said I. “Oho!” said he, and even over the phone I could feel the excitement rise. “The rabbis would take the ancient text, and read it in new ways. On this one, where the To…

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

By Sarah Posner

…going to war to a conversation about the ability to hold two seemingly conflicting ideas in one’s head at once. “People seem to believe that if you really support Israel, there’s no heartspace to grieve civilian deaths in Gaza. And if you’re horrified by the rockets and tunnels, you’re disregarding Palestinian suffering,” said Brous. Both of those views, she said, “are absurd. It’s actually very Jewish to hold both.” Rabbi Eric Solomon of Beth Me…

Are We Living Through World War III?

By Haroon Moghul

…t get there? If there is a “civil war” within Islam, it’s a multi-sided conflict of hopeless complexity, in which the West, including the United States, isn’t just involved, but deeply complicit, as are countless Muslim agitators, instigators, or enables. And many other countries and forces beside. What makes this World War so different from the last ones, though, is that instead of a series of imperial powers facing off against each other simulta…

The Queerness of Christian Ethics: A Conversation with Rev. Elizabeth Edman

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…” in our arsenal for justice. We find love, joy and community on the dance floor. To me, that gestures toward the transcendent. Candace, you wrote a book on what it means to be “bulletproof,” To me, that’s recognizing that people can come in with an actual gun—but there is something that we’re living here that survives even that. Love demands vulnerability, and we live it every day. Scripture calls us to rely on God alone—not on some weapon, not o…

Gimme Shelter: Queer Space Is Sanctuary

By Kaya Oakes

…before the cops come in, the shooter, the good old boys with a confederate flag on their pickup, enraged bigots with hands full of flame. In the ’80s I joined a band with a bunch of queers, all of them refugees from small towns. It was possible, in those days, to live in the Bay Area on the wages you made as a stripper, a cook, a house cleaner. It was possible to be two brown queers, a white queer, and a white straight girl and play improvised noi…

Our Dance Clubs, Our Churches

By Peter Laarman

…aise and yet more praise for all of God’s blessings. So yes, this thing in Orlando is difficult to take, and it feels personal. There were goosebumps when I woke to the news, and there were unbidden tears when I discovered that a young friend’s college classmate was in that club when the slaughter began. I’m not ready for the reflexive liberal things that we do: the sign-on statements, the interfaith vigils, the finger pointing and the placing of…

Hajj Journal: M & M

By Amina Wadud

…ber two would be leaving around 2 a.m. He arbitrarily divided the group by floors: floors 6 and below would go at midnight and the rest of us would go sometime later, on the second bus. Because this is what I came for, the hajj that is, I was way off in the “on pins and needles” camp. I lay in bed sometime around ten, after the bath and packing a backpack and deciding what I would actually wear. Again this is where solid advice is really, really h…