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First Congregational UCC, Ripon Wisconsin

Cheese State Reality Check: On The Wisconsin Idea and the Social Gospel

By Daniel Schultz

…on works in Bascom Hall, and the Bascom dairy on campus sells probably the best ice cream in the state. Likewise Charles Van Hise, the long-serving president of the UW is remembered with a hall where generations of students have studied foreign languages. People outside of Badgerland might be more familiar with Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, founder of the Progressive Party in the early 20th century, and still today an inspiration to lefties. E…

Soccer and the Sublime in the Shadow of Apartheid

By Preston Davis

…ntage of his athletic skill to move to wealthy Europe at age 14, where the best footballers are treated like gods and paid even better. He’s the highest paid player in Italian club football, but but when he was traded from Real Madrid to Barcelona he told the press corps, “I mean to run like a black man so I can live like a white one.” This year the tournament takes place in South Africa. It’s imagined to be that country’s global moment of redempt…

Jesus’ Language More Complicated Than Experts Claim

By Seth Sanders

…Palestinian Jews revert to their linguistic counterpart at key points. The best manuscripts of Palestinian Targum (Bible translations into Aramaic) sometimes use the old Hebrew circumlocution for the name of God, adonay, (though we also find the Greek loanword kurios!). Surely many readers of the Hebrew Bible would be surprised to know that the Tetragrammaton, which they are taught to read adonay in Biblical Hebrew class, is, as noted above, often…

Shhh…Don’t Speak of Abortion: Roe v. Wade at Thirty-Six

By Frederick Clarkson

…and to model that dialogue to the country.” The idea that abortion is sometimes the best moral choice is the view of many major religious institutions representing tens of millions of American Christians, Jews, Unitarians, and others. Many of these institutions are represented in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), including major mainline Protestant denominations (such as the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ),…

A Furious Sadness: Conversation with Christian Protester of Nazi-Saluting Trump Supporter

By Daniel Schultz

…er the event had been cancelled. We were still inside the Pavilion at that time, and a Trump supporter was shoving one of the protesters on the front line there. Cops had moved away there and it was just us and them. I yelled at some dude, as if this was an effective time to start conversation: “What do you even like about this man? What are you defending? You’re better than this!” Which sounds so ridiculous now. Tell me about Birgitt Peterson. Wh…

Fake, Evil, Spiritual, Commodified; What’s the Truth About Popular Yoga?

By Andrea R. Jain

…of yoga as an acceptable consumer choice. Yet, Selling Yoga illuminates a number of growing movements that oppose popularized yoga and even sometimes court fear of it. Some Christians, including Albert Mohler (President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), Pat Robertson (television evangelist and founder of the Christian Coalition of America), and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Roman Catholic Church, warn about th…

“Who Was Muhammad, Was He Violent?”: Teaching Islam Ten Years
after 9/11

By Abbas Barzegar

…g flowers at the office door of our Muslim Student Association at the same time our members reported being spat on. Responding to such bigotry, civic leaders, faith-based coalitions, and academics charged the battle lines of public discourse in the best spirit of humanism to show that Islam, like all other religions, was at its core a force of good in the world corrupted by the ill-conceived actions of a few. When opportunist authors and their pre…

Evangelical Author on Why Christian Conservatives Supported Trump

By Eric C. Miller

…kes me wonder if they weren’t simply convincing themselves that he was the best option at the time and that, somehow, their vote was a “righteous” vote. He’s had about a 10-15 percent drop-off in support from the evangelical community since taking office. So while there may be a sort of exaggerated self-reporting around the time when an evangelical casts a vote, there is some indication that there was never really that depth of devotion. I don’t t…

“I Had No Intention to Write Atheistically”: Darwin, God, and the 2500-Year History of the Debate

By Edward J. Larson

…Dawkins likes to put it, a “blind watchmaker.” Dawkins’ books have become bestsellers in the United States and Britain, and his vision of human evolution (or more precisely, the vision of it that he popularized from the work of such preeminent late-twentieth-century biologists as William Hamilton and E.O. Wilson) is shared by many evolutionary biologists today. Humans, like all living organisms, “are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly progr…

Satanic Harmonies and Zoom Church: Readers Respond

By Daniel Schultz

…e “‘fanatical’ and ‘hateful’ ‘tribal’ Likud” and conservatives doing their best to throw blame on the left. All of this in sharp contrast to response to the tweet itself, which was much more directed at the offending extremist than to Likudniks as a whole. A.R. thinks this is the result of Maariv making a tempest out of a teapot. American media is certainly no stranger to this routine—outrage gets clicks, and in this age of negative partisanship,…