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California Inmates Protest the Abuse of Long-Term Solitary Confinement

By Sarah Sentilles

…olor further calls into question the use of this abusive practice.” As the numbers have grown, so have the numbers of critics, Wired reports, citing a series of “scathing reports and documentaries” released in 2012 by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. That same year, the US Senate held its first-ever hearings on…

Christians Must Confront the Lies at the Heart of Whiteness

By Rachel C. Schneider

On Wednesday, January 6, a day now infamous for many Americans, I was pulled from my daily work tasks by a colleague’s text urging me to turn on the television and stop all work. We all know what happened that day. But as I watched the storming of the capital—replete with white supremacy symbols, Christian symbols, Trump iconography, and images of weapons—I had an overwhelming sense, not of shock, but of inevitability. Nothing I was seeing reflec…

Death Couture: Not For Halloween Only

By Stephen Andes

…ns, devotion to La Santa Muerte provides more hope in dealing with the profound social fragmentation and instability caused by drug violence than the spiritual succor offered by the institutional Church. In contrast to the American celebration of Halloween, largely a religious-turned-commercial holiday, Mexico’s Days of Dead are spaces where community solidarity, remembrance, and family continuity take shape. In this context, the image of La Sant…

Drop that Candy Bar, Pagan!

By Peter Montgomery

…ve near Dallas, Texas, you can attend Generals International’s Reformation Day celebration and pray for a “fresh start” for America, just in time for the elections. Reformation Day features Cindy Jacobs and Dutch Sheets, self-proclaimed apostles associated with the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation. Jacobs warns that President Obama is bringing God’s wrath in the form of natural disasters. And earlier this year Sheets railed against wimpy Chri…

Savoring the Haterade: Why Jews Love Dara Horn’s ‘People Love Dead Jews’

By Shaul Magid

…to become part of the daily chatter of Jews unable to devote their entire day to study. It was a brilliant idea and widely successful, far more than Shapiro could have imagined. For Horn, the Talmud is the testament of dead Jews and daf yomi is how Jews love them. One page every day. So we’ve come full circle. Loving dead Jews isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you’re a Jew. In fact, it’s the very quintessence of Torah study, the centerpiece of Je…

Are Colored Eggs More
Easter-y than Cesar Chavez?

By Peter Anthony Mena

…honor of Cesar Chávez’s 86th birthday also happened to appear on Easter Sunday, one of the most sacred days for Christians the world over. Responses ranged from mild disappointment to vows to replace Google with search engines like Bing (which decorated its homepage with Easter eggs). But what underlies nearly all the comments is the assumption of the whiteness of U.S. Christianity alongside the pairing of brownness with particular political agend…

Denying Darwin: Another Peculiar American Institution

By Lauri Lebo

…main divided. Interestingly enough, we are also celebrating the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, who presided over an even more torn-apart nation, and who ended that other peculiar institution of ours, one even more divisive than our present battles over religion and science. Fundamentalist Fervor According to Ron Numbers, in his book The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, the rise of Christian fundamentalism in Ame…

Did Pope Francis Win, Lose or Draw at the Family Synod?

By Patricia Miller

…person of Jesus and in the community of the church. But at the end of the day, the decisions that the Vatican takes on these issues do have real-world implications that are inevitably “political,” as the church’s efforts to oppose same-sex marriage and contraceptive access have shown. And while the pope and the bishops debate how many divorced or gay Catholics can fit on the head of a pin, these temporal realities continued to evolve—with or with…

The Secret Life of Mormons: As Told by Prodigal Daughter, Novelist Judith Freeman

By Joanna Brooks

…been a more effective mapping of the subterranean emotional landscapes of day-to-day American religious life than Latter Days. But after so many years writing fiction, why a memoir now? Judith Freeman: It began with Romney running for president and friends of mine asking, “Who is he?” There was so much that he wasn’t saying about himself, about his religion. I knew that journalists in press conference and even Harold Bloom would never ask the rig…

Diplomatic Suckerhood: Why Israel Is Fighting Toward its Own Demise

By Ira Chernus

…ch sets the vicious cycle going all over again. Perhaps Israelis will some day be so afraid of the dangerous consequences of rejecting peace that they will turn toward peace. But it seems more likely that real peace will begin only when enough Israelis decide that they no longer want to define themselves by their traditional self-image, that they want a new one to match the reality of their power. Then the majority of Israeli voters will be able t…