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GOP Candidate: Obama is Taking Your Freedom to Find the Lord

…rsonal choice between you and the god or gods you don’t believe in. What’s best about America, though, is that each person, religious or not, has the right to be treated with both equality and equity by their government (though they may have to fight for that right to be recognized). I find it odd, though, that those who make the best arguments for the separation of church and state are most often those trying to marry the two until death do us al…

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Christian Passover, Yes or No?: A Response to Rabbi Moffic

…different interpretations and practices from other faith-traditions is at best syncretism. At worst, it is a violation of the integrity of all faith-traditions. Go to top A Christian seder, some suggest, crosses […] boundaries. The way to address this concern is not to condemn the seders. It is to bring in rabbis and other knowledgeable Jews who can help facilitate them […] President Obama has held seders at the White House every year of his Pres…

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‘I Don’t Buy It’: The Gospel According to Frank Underwood

…ide what’s just. It’s not your place to choose the version of God you like best. It’s not your duty to serve this country alone and it better not be your goal to simply serve yourself. You serve the Lord, and through him you serve others. Two rules: Love God, love each other. Period. … You weren’t chosen, Mr. President. [gestures to crucifix again]. Only He was. Brilliant! What a beautiful articulation of Christian theology. The first time I watch…

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Marriage is for Everybody, Says Former Anti-Gay Evangelical

…t of technical scholarly debates about what they did and did not mean. The best you wind up with is a statement that says, “Well, these passages don’t mean what you think they mean.” It was essentially an argument from silence, which I don’t find compelling. As I was writing this I was trying to keep in mind a couple of families in my congregation. They were just regular folks who had children come to them and they were very upset with this. We ha…

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Can the “Spiritual Left” Make the Change They Wish to See?

…ough emotional self-development. Spiritual practitioners argue that we can best change the world through changing ourselves. If we properly govern our own emotional responses, lowering negative emotion while cultivating positive emotion we make our country a better place, one interpersonal interaction at a time. And so, when Yoga Journal asked 10 yogis to offer reflections on the presidential election results, it’s not surprising that they emphasi…

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The Women’s March, Anti-Semitism, and ‘The Jewish Farrakhan’

…ntisemitic act, is thus interpreted as if it is by definition insincere at best, trickery at worst. Acknowledging the good the NOI has done in helping single Black women and incarcerated Black men doesn’t matter because acknowledging the legitimacy of an antisemite, even regarding things that have nothing whatsoever to do with Jews, puts one in his camp. Antisemitism is no longer a descriptor of behavior, but a tool of exclusion. This controversy,…

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An Interview with Rep. Jamie Raskin on the Feminist and Abolitionist Founder Who Has Slipped into a Memory Hole

…One of the brilliant themes in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton—whose closing number is “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”—concerns the stories we as a nation tell about our Founders, something Raskin invokes. “The absence of a Paine memorial in Washington is a real problem in our political culture. So much of the pop culture debate today is a fight between the fans of Hamilton and Jefferson.” Hamilton’s “scrappy biography” has been so crea…

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Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

…r, as delivered to his army, to ISIS’ practices. I pronounce the Prophet’s best friend a better interpreter of Islam than poorly reconstructed Ba’athists on the Muslim margins.) Suleiman stressed: “Freeing slaves” is so frequently mentioned as a meritorious act in the Muslim tradition that, in the 8th and 9th centuries, biographies of Prophetic companions cited, as virtues, manumission; Muhammad’s wife, Aisha, was lauded for “freeing six hundred s…

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New Research May Explain the Weakness of Centrism and the Religious Left

…n’t interested in playing nice with people they considered wrong-headed at best and apostates at worst. I was once told by a member of my congregation that I was the kind of guy who would hold the gas chamber doors when “they” ushered in conservative Christians, which spoiled any transpartisan illusions I may have had. To make matters worse, the explosion of the “nones” in recent years meant that Democrats had a lot more to lose by not standing up…

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Irony Repeats Itself: Reconsidering Reinhold Niebuhr in the Trump Era

…mocracy necessary.” Liberal democracy is worth defending because it is the best way to restrain human egotism and will-to-power, not because it fulfills an ideal. In 1944, Niebuhr still believed that political democracy needed to grow into economic democracy to attain social justice and protect democracy itself. But he was almost done with saying so, and he no longer believed that his country was capable of socializing the economy, unlike what his…

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