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Memo to David Brooks: Francis Is Not Naïve For Criticizing Capitalism

By Peter Laarman

…credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign energy sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or perhap…

Malta Adopts Marriage Equality Over Objections of Catholics and Evangelicals; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ligious worship. “We would like to have the peace of mind that none of our members will be ‘forced’ to act against their conscience, seeing that Article 32(a) states that as Maltese we have ‘freedom of conscience’,” Edwin Caruana, head of TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance of Malta), said. TEAM is seeking that members of religious organisations be accorded a right akin to ‘conscientious objection’. “We seek that our rights to freedom of religion and f…

New Mormon Anti-Gay Policy Sparks Mass Exodus From Church; Christian AID Workers in Africa Refuse to Help Gay Refugees; Ukraine Rejects, Then Accepts EU-Required Gay Rights Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…is impossible for me to be a part of a religion that would attack its own members and punish them by denying their children involvement in the church. The move is as clever as it is draconian. Members seeking to live lives of integrity as openly LGBT people must not only leave the church, but take their children with them. It requires a particular streak of evil genius to manufacture such a “Sophie’s choice.” Kendell wrote that the news was “crus…

The Radical Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Left’s Challenge Today

By Peter Laarman

…hallenge the still-standing structure of American imperialism—the enormous military and “intelligence” footprint of this country—which is just as much an expression of white supremacy as is domestic police terrorism and anti-Black repression? (It would surely strike King as odd that the cost of maintaining this footprint hardly enters into today’s political conversation and that nearly everyone seems to be more or less okay with dropping $6.4 tril…

Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

By Arthur Waskow

…tian radical A. J. Muste calling Moses the organizer of “Brickmakers Union Number 1” and a pacifist Russian rabbi named Tamaret—wove them all into a new Telling of the tale of freedom. In that Telling, the then ongoing, even now unfinished, struggle of Black America for freedom was interwoven with the ancient story of the Israelites’ struggle to end their slavery under Pharaoh. Where the old Haggadah had what seemed to me a silly argument about ho…

A Muslim Reflects on Christian Theologian (and UCLA Coach) John Wooden

By Amir Hussain

…er of the amazing things about him. He was approachable, answering his own phone and mail, meeting with complete nobodies like me. I thanked him for the basketball lessons that I had learned from him, but more importantly for the life lessons. His beloved wife Nellie had passed away in 1985 after 53 years of marriage, and my wife had died suddenly in 1992. Coach gave me a powerful model for dealing with that loss, a reminder that those we loved we…

Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

By Nick Street

…King Jr. She and another rider compose messages that they hope to give to members of the Baptist Missionary Association of Arkansas, which owns Central Baptist College and is holding a meeting on campus while the Soulforce crew keeps its vigil along College Avenue. Parke, 25, says she studied theology as an undergraduate at Texas Lutheran University before she moved to Seattle, where she now works for an agency that provides services to homeless…

The Theology of Westboro: The “World’s Meanest Church” Is More Than Picket Signs

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…enough to get my research started, but then the church began to picket at military funerals. The public response to anti-military pickets was swift and left me wondering how Westboro fit into the larger conservative Christian landscape. It also raised questions about how other religious conservatives were using Westboro Baptist Church as a foil to advance their own anti-LGBT agendas and their own notions about God’s relationship to America. When…

Hajj Journal: M & M

By Amina Wadud

…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…

The Ghosts and Illusions of the Occupation

By Sarah Posner

…s not “extraordinary”: home demolitions and other facets of non-democratic military rule have become the norm for occupier and occupied alike. For Jewish perpetrators, though, B’Tselem says that the Israeli military “do not do enough to prevent Israeli civilians from attacking Palestinians, their property and their lands,” and that “perpetrators are rarely tried, and many cases are not investigated at all or are closed with no operative conclusion…