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Time to Reject the “We’re All Sinners” Defense of Religious Conservatives

By Jonathan Malesic

…ed in the current season of the Netflix documentary series, Last Chance U, points the way. “I ain’t living no perfect life,” says Jay Johnson, a tall young man with long braids and a sharp chin, to his friends in a dark parking lot. “You ain’t living no perfect life. We ain’t living no perfect life.” While he’s speaking, someone chimes in, “Nobody’s perfect, man.” This conversation among young black men occurs right after a weeknight bible study a…

Graeme Wood on ISIS: No Such Thing as Objective Critique

By Eric M. Gurevitch

…r context of anti-Muslim discourse produced after 9/11. Wood’s fundamental point is that the U.S. has misunderstood the ‘Islamic State’ because it ignores its ideology—one rooted in a specific implementation of Islamic texts. Wood relies, as he explains, on the work of an expert scholar: Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarr…

Take the Van Gogh Challenge: Doctor Who Part VII

By Gabriel Mckee

…compelling—and if so, why. Religion (as I see it—and of course that’s the point!) differs from science inasmuch as it isn’t primarily about describing the world as it is (although it should take our best understanding of the natural world into account), but about depicting the world as it could be, and transforming it into that better vision of reality. And of course, when religion takes a harmful view of the future, it can often contribute to br…

What the National Council of Churches Should Say About Financial Reform

By Daniel Schultz

…etc. etc. I am being impolite for dramatic effect, of course. You get the point. Religious progressives don’t need to be rude, but they do need to be effective. Begging the government to fund education, unemployment, and human services programs is a disastrously weak frame. Until somebody names the real dynamic here — that most of us are laying bricks for Pharaoh — and points out, firmly, the injustice of the situation, nobody’s going to listen,…

Democrats Look to Conservative Evangelicals on Immigration

By Sarah Posner

…lly embarrass me. They are an embarrassment to the Catholic Church at this point, particularly with the stand they are taking.” Palacios said Catholics for Equality will fill a void: there is no group doing political work reaching out to Catholics who support LGBT rights. “We’re not interested in reforming the church, we’re interested simply in getting fair-minded Catholics, move them in the direction in of LGBT rights,” he said. Palacios noted th…

The British (Bible) Invasion: KJV 400-Year Anniversary Rolls On

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…his). Better is his subtle tracing of the biblical lines of influence on a number of important American writers, especially Melville, whose Moby Dick also counts as the single most important work of American fiction by no less a religious and cultural critic than Cornel West. Bragg’s book is an extraordinary compendium of information, less about the creation of the KJV than about its long cultural aftermath. It thus supplements the story of the cr…

The Promise of Immortality in a Tech-Enhanced Heaven

By Lisa Webster

…lives; do all kinds of exercises and on and on. And there are all sorts of points in-between. That’s why I have to laugh at people who refer to transhumanism as a cult. There are certainly more than a few people in transhumanism who would turn it into a cult if they could (although they wouldn’t acknowledge this), but most participants are too slippery. I would say that some transhumanists and singularitarians are sort of religious about it in the…

Steve Jobs, #occupywallst, and Usury

By Jay Michaelson

…caused the 2008 crash would never have been legal in the first place. My point here, though, is somewhat different. Because, as my conservative friend implied, usury is not just a musty Biblical sin, but a charge specifically levied against Jews. There was a clear historical reason for this: the medieval church banned usury, but Jews were exempt from the ban. Meanwhile, the Biblical rule (in the part I covered with ellipses above) allowed Jews t…

Conservatives Have Officially Become the Catholic Church’s Tea Party

By Patricia Miller

…se of grace…“‘Catholic’ means ‘universal,’ not ‘continental.’ Kurtz warned pointedly that allowing different communion practices would “fracture” the church. Which brings up yet another way that Catholic conservatives are like the Tea Party: They threaten to bring down the church via talk of a schism if they don’t get their way, much like the Tea Party threatens to bring down the government if they don’t get theirs. Talk of schism has been in the…

Losing Their ‘Religion’

By Rachel Gordan

…a big book about how to revitalize Jewish life in America, but his staring point was that young, educated Jews would love to find the nearest exit. As it turned out, Kaplan’s ideas had enormous impact on American Jewish life. So, it’s hard not think: here we are, eighty years later, with signs of much greater self-esteem among Jews. With that starting point, what kinds of possibilities for Jewish life in America await us? *Read more from “Pew and…