Religion Dispatches
…nd liberated possibilities (thanks again, Joe Biden). But who knew it would turn out that the NFL has a thing or two to teach the gospel church—born of, but these days largely in flight from, the legacy of King and Rustin and Baldwin—about love, acceptance, and the struggle to overcome in a world of injustice?…
Read More…ames’ Gang”: “Word was brought to the Fifth Police Station to-night that a number of boys were using the Concord-street School-house for some unknown purpose, and a posse of officers was sent to investigate. The gang scattered at the approach of the police, and in their flight on drew a revolver and fired at Officer Rowan, without effect, however. William Nangle, age 14, and Sidney Duncan, age 12, were captured, but the other five or six escaped,…
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On Christmas Day, 2009, as a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam prepared to land in Detroit, passengers smelled smoke and heard a series of bangs or popping noises. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old man from a prominent Nigerian family, was attempting to ignite an explosive device sewn into his underwear. He succeeded only in igniting himself—after his arrest, he had to be treated for second-degree burns on his hands and crotch. Inst…
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…ell every six months. But the string of replies to the tweet, as well as a number of pained blog posts, make clear that Driscoll’s rhetoric is at least as alienating to thoughtful Christians across the ideological spectrum as it is titillating to his followers. For those Christians often straining to sustain their identification and affiliation with one or another branch of the Christian family, Driscoll comes off like the ranting, half-drunk cous…
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On a warm day in July 2013, I found myself on the wrong end of a canceled flight out of RDU Airport. I used the opportunity to travel into downtown Raleigh to observe one of the early Moral Monday rallies at the State Capitol. The gathering was ostensibly called to protest the legislature’s newly gerrymandered district map – among the most tortured in the nation. I expected to find a group of committed, passionate citizens (mostly people of color…
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…bsessed with church/state separation and battling creationists. Again, the number of atheists of color has grown, but the atheist movement as a whole has not embraced the issues that people of color struggle with on a daily basis. For example, the wealth gap between blacks and whites is more pronounced now than during the Brown vs. Board era. When I drive around in my community I see scores of abandoned businesses, boarded up buildings, vacant lo…
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…aft accusations did not involve carnal relations with the Devil, nocturnal flight, or being able to fall down stairs without sustaining injury. Though they imputed magical evildoing, the accusations mostly involved more mundane human problems, like suspicion, resentment, and festering doubt. This characteristic aligns with what anthropologists and historians who work on comparative witchcraft have made clear: that while witch fears can take quite…
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…a bat?, we immediately come upon the problem of differences— —right, a bat flight simulator! But one of the things that we need to recognize is that . . . human beings experience their worlds very differently. I’m very interested in the phenomenon of disagreement. What does it mean when two people look at the same information and they come to different conclusions? To me, that is in some way indexing how deeply ingrained our affective experiential…
Read More…$119.1 billion annually. Hannah Harris Green reports on the ongoing legal flight of LGBT refugees, taking note of a recent decision by the U.S. Appeals Court for the Ninth Circuit that an immigration judge had erred in refusing to acknowledge an asylum seeker’s transgender identity. The article touches on those seeking asylum in Canada, Australia, and Europe. An excerpt: This decision means that transgender immigrants who fight their cases in the…
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…a new love-centered Christian orientation (note the silhouette of birds in flight on the book jacket), McLaren also speaks of conversion, and I read the book more through the conversion lens (I’m not sure that the migration metaphor works as well as the author hoped it might). The tone throughout is warm and engaging, and the book is filled with telling anecdotes. But McLaren is never less than a master teacher with a solid lesson plan. He moves,…
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