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

By Andrew L. Seidel

…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…

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

By Haroon Moghul

…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…

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

By Daniel Schultz

…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…

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

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…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…

Irony Repeats Itself: Reconsidering Reinhold Niebuhr in the Trump Era

By Gary Dorrien

…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…

Three Cheers for Mormon Support of Same-Sex Legislation? Not So Fast

By Chrissy Stroop

…r their rights (to very little fanfare and often to dismissal or apathy at best), this provision bothers me deeply. In any case, RFMA is very much not the Equality Act, a bill that would provide sweeping non-discrimination protections for queer Americans that has languished in Congress for years. It’s a defensive piece of legislation, a protection of the status quo rather than a step forward. If America were truly a functional democracy, we could…

AIG: On Charisma and Routinization of Greed

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…t simplicity and broad comparative reach. The prophet, Weber suggested, is best defined as the unique bearer of charisma. No sooner had Weber offered his “unified theory” of the prophet than he subdivided the essential concept again, noting that there were two very different kinds of charisma with which he had to deal. On the one hand, there is the charisma of personality; on the other, there is the charisma of office. The two forms rarely, if eve…

Is Liberalism Islamic?: An Interview with Mustafa Akyol

By Haroon Moghul

…y in unprecedented levels. I also think that today liberalism presents the best medium for Muslims to live Islam in the various ways that they understand it. Let me push you a little bit here. I would argue that most interpretations of Islam place a strong emphasis on the social, the communal, often above the individual—and if we stress the liberation of the individual from larger collectives, does Islam play any role in the great social questions…

The Right Wing Bible and the Politics of Impotence

By Christopher B. Hays

…and Chua’s exhortations. What Chua’s philosophy boiled down to is: Be the best, kick all those lazy kids’ butts. But if winning itself is not enough motivation (if the answer to life is not being honored by playing Carnegie Hall and getting the high-paying, prestigious job), it’s not clear what sort of motivation there would be. Similarly, if you’re not innately inspired to want to kick China’s butt, if you ask why?, you are likely to be met with…

No God but Country: The Religion of John McCain Has Something Important to Tell Us

By Kathryn Lofton

…d.” When asked whether he has participated in adult baptism, a ritual requisite for converts to the Convention, McCain says no, calling it “a personal thing,” adding on another occasion that “I didn’t find it necessary to do so for my spiritual needs.” McCain’s decision not to participate in a major ritual of Baptist practice may be laziness, may be diffidence, or it may be a desire to evade hypocrisy. If I don’t take communion when I attend an Ep…