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For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

By Lynne Gerber

…v. Carl Beans to his seemingly endless hospital visits in the AIDS units of 1980s Los Angeles. Rev. Penny Nixon, who ministered in MCC’s San Francisco congregation in the 1990s, felt bodily memories of AIDS ministry rise in the first few weeks of Covid and then recede in the face of the also-familiar need to put feelings away and get to work. “How we got through the last pandemic,” she said, “it became the reality. You put your head down and you d…

The University of Vermont Might Be Done With Religion, But Religion Isn’t Done With Us

By Megan Goodwin

…its decision to eliminate its Religion Department last week. Enrollments + service + awards = cancelled, apparently? UVM administrators claim their decision is based in cold, hard math: Religion just doesn’t have enough majors. But the number of majors a department has does not equal how much revenue a department generates. Enrollments do that, and UVM’s award-winning faculty members consistently over-enroll their courses. Not to mention that UVM…

There is Another Reason Trump Refuses to Concede the Election

By Chad Bauman

…osperity movement and took the nation by storm. Similarly, the president’s spiritual advisor, Paula White-Cain, is a prominent contemporary figure in the movement, having survived a 2007 investigation opened by Republican Senator Charles Grassley into her finances (and those of several other prosperity preachers). As election returns showed the president’s early lead evaporating into the ether last Wednesday, White-Cain broadcasted a prayer servic…

What is Juneteenth to America? It Has to Be More Than ‘Black 4th of July’ if It’s to Be Truly Meaningful

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…been here before, from Reconstruction to the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s the struggle to form a more perfect union has been continually been rejected in favor of new intransigent forms of anti-black racism. However, with each return to this very spot a portion of the nation’s soul is permanently lost. Prophets such as Douglass, King, and Baldwin have warned us time and time again that the nation cannot continue on this path and…

Some Mormons See a Message in the Angel Moroni’s Fallen Trumpet

By Christopher James Blythe

…above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.” Construction began in 1853. In 1892, the Angel Moroni was placed on its tower and a year after that the building was dedicated. While an angel had appeared on the weathervane of the Nauvoo Temple in the 1840s, this was the first time the iconic figure of the trumpeting angel Moroni was used. Similar angels would later appear on nearly all the church’s temples across the globe. The figure recall…

Satanists Want You to Respond to the Pandemic with Compassion. And Reason.

By Joseph Laycock

…in their respective holes, how is The Satanic Temple (TST) faring? On March 15, TST co-founder Lucien Greaves released a statement announcing that all in-person meetings were cancelled and urging everyone to engage in social distancing. The statement invoked the first of TST’s Seven Tenets, that “One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason,” and reminded readers they have a moral duty to prev…

In Time of Crisis Christians Must Reject Charlatans and Magical Thinking

By Brian Rainey

…dly explanations. Their cults are crude perversions of Christianity in the service of a demonic “free-market” god. And the devotees of this god are dedicated imitators of him. They are money-making entrepreneurs using the language of Scripture, and exploiting humanity’s deep desire for meaning and comfort, to hawk their wares of pure fantasy, group-think and bigotry. Shockingly, but unsurprisingly, some lobbyists and politicians even schemed to pa…

COVID-19 is Concentrating Wealth Even Further; Can we Talk About the Surplus of Powerlessness in the Faith Community?

By Peter Laarman

…ation, it’s 50 years of failure—of taking for granted that the gains of the 1960s and especially the 1970s were secure; 50 years of dithering while the Right was successfully muscling up, building its infrastructure, and capturing and eviscerating government itself. And now Trump. And now this. It’s understandable that we don’t want to talk about failure—and try to learn from it. It’s in our cultural DNA never to dwell on failure (with one notable…

A Pandemic isn’t a War, But Recognizing What They Share May Help us Heal

By Zachary Moon

…the wider stress. Shelter-in-place is not only a civic duty; it’s a psycho-spiritual-emotional condition. When we scramble to find the last available package of toilet paper, we’re committing the perfect demonstration of our most basic concern: “hey, with all this going on, I’m just worried about my a–” The scale of this trauma could turn us ultimately in a different direction: toward collective concern for our neighbors and the interrelated globa…

Sure, There’s No ‘Religious Left’… If You Ignore Non-White Christians and Non-Christians

By Daniel Schultz

…to the right of Sanders as “neoliberal.” As Jack Jenkins of Religion News Service demonstrated in a long thread, if you take a broader view, the religious left is very much more than “people on the internet,” including the Democratic Socialist icon Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. And as many others, like Dana Houle, pointed out with varying degrees of sarcasm, Bruenig’s tweet ignored the substantial portion of the religious left that’s non-white, and/or…