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Fake Rabbi Showdown

By Peter Manseau

…bbat—and he’d just flown in for the occasion. The next day, he handed me a business card that read, “Rabbi Dr. Mordehi Waldman: Have Shofar Will Travel.” He had enjoyed 15 minutes of fame a few years back, when he appeared at a reception held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building and blew his shofar to announce the coming of the messiah just before Moon had himself crowned “humanity’s Savior” and “returning Lord.” After journalist John Gorenfeld w…

Baptist Blogger who Discovered Land Plagiarism says Investigation is “Unprecedented”

By Sarah Posner

…berally from a Washington Times column by Jeffrey Kuhner and an Investors’ Business Daily editorial about the Martin case without attribution. Some of the verbatim, unattributed quotes from the Kuhner column included: [H]e [Obama] said, If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. The president’s aides claim he was showing compassion for the victim’s family. In reality, he poured gasoline on the racialist fires. Under pressure from the Cong…

Notify This! Vatican Bungles Response to Sexual Ethics Book

By Mary E. Hunt

…prestigious and generous prize ($200,000 is real money in the theological business) realized Margaret was doing an outstanding job as a moral theologian in the broad interreligious conversation that is now the gold standard in the field. Vatican interlocutors, who obviously have no clue about such matters, only embarrass themselves by publishing their ignorance in six languages. They leave the distinct impression that they are oblivious to the fa…

Red White and Blue No Longer

By Peter Laarman

…s who are here without documents; it did little to help the vastly greater number of immigrant community members today who were born in this country but who are still often treated as though they are here illegally. Here’s a proposition: if breaking the grip of plantation capitalism and its political enablers requires the empowerment of immigrant communities and communities of color, then white liberals who are serious about wanting a significant…

From Murderous to ‘MORG’: Mormonism Meets the Press

By Joanna Brooks

…ith campaign priorities. (Clayton Christensen, another Harvard-affiliated, business world-molded Mormon leader has emerged lately as a Romney media surrogate.) Romney’s reticence can be understood as a feature of the late twentieth century LDS corporate culture that formed and rewarded him. Late twentieth century corporate LDS Church culture strongly emphasized disciplined messaging (also known as “correlation”) as well as individual obedience and…

Bishops Search for Condoms in Cookie Boxes

By Mary E. Hunt

…oose to take on these girls and women. Gone are the days when governments, businesses, and armies worried much about what the bishops had to say. Here are the days when disgraced bishops are deposed and indicted for the sexual crimes and cover-ups that have come to define contemporary Catholicism. By contrast, nuns and Girl Scouts are powerful symbols and equally powerful advocates for justice and peace. So in a sense the bishops have really taken…

No Longer At Sea: Kate Bornstein Talks Scientology

By Kristin Rawls

…d this numeric tone scale, and I studied that. Lord knows where he got the numbers from, but 1.0 on the tone scale is fear, 1.1 is covert hostility, which is the tone level of all Suppressive Persons. 1.5 is anger. He said all you have to do to bring someone “uptone”—or put them in a better mood—was to speak half a tone to a full tone above the other person. Any higher, they won’t listen to you. Any lower, they’ll be really bummed out. And I thoug…

Eat, Pray, Kill: The Basic Brutality of Eating

By Beatrice Marovich

…this is not a sign of our human failure. Rather, I think we can see it as an encouragement to keep making those small lists. Morality is a messy business—why should we expect its rules to be singular, or simple?…

Methodists Vote to Keep Homosexuality “Incompatible”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…a break, those who supported the petition remained in the hall, singing as business began again. The presiding bishop, Michael Coyner of the Indiana Conference, shut down the meeting, calling the LGBT advocates a “security concern.” The morning’s vote and actions by the bishop were a disappointment to David Braden, the director of development for the Reconciling Ministries Network, which works for the full inclusion of LGBT people into the UMC: “W…

The Sad Saga of a Compromised Rabbi

By Shaul Magid

…early 20th that would make our hair stand on end. When one gets into this business, either as a professional or as a moonlighter, it comes with the territory. This is not the disease. The disease is that some of us have become so impassioned in making our views known that we have abandoned one of the fundamental elements of integrity in public discourse: privacy. We assume that when we communicate privately, in word or letter, with our colleagues…