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How Muslim Civic Activism Helped Pass California’s Prop 47

By Nick Street

…s,” said Zach Hoover, executive director of LA Voice. “At the press conference for the Fair Chance Initiative, we prayed Jummah on the lawn in front of City Hall. For Prop 47 we had over two hundred Muslims, Jews and Christians gathered at West Angeles Church on the eve of Sukkot. It’s just really beautiful.” In the broader faith-based activism that is providing energy for California’s leadership in criminal justice reform, Hoover said he sees a c…

The Pope in My Pocket; We Are All Dilettantes Now

By Michael A. Elliott

…idoscope served up on cable television or the world wide web. What is distinct about the iPhone and similar devices is they that they will allow us to dabble in a variety of faith traditions—to test the waters without committing a large investment of time or money, and without risk of public exposure. Thanks to the interactivity available in a smartphone application, we can all become religious dilettantes. A Pew Forum study published last year fo…

Exclusive: Columnist Jonathan Merritt on his Sudden Departure From Religion News Service

By Kaya Oakes

…lete Socolovsky from the email chain. When Merritt’s assistant scheduled a phone meeting with Gallagher to discuss the contract in April of this year, Gallagher never informed Socolovsky about it. When Merritt finally reached Gallagher on the phone in April of this year, he says Gallagher was “placing the blame [for the delay] on Jerome” for not reading Merritt’s emails, which “was all very weird and unprofessional, and it made me uncomfortable.”…

Hajj Journal: M & M

By Amina Wadud

…camps and after. Some had more of something that resembled a group experience enhancing the individual experiences. I think it would have gone a long way to make it through the next few days. At one other point that evening, another member of this motley crew suggested that we organize to get at least 30 people to each read one juz’, one part of the Qur’an, so that collectively, in this tent, we could say that we had read the whole Qur’an the nig…

Our Lady of Good Hope and Excellent Behavior: Why this Apparition and Why Now?

By Lisa Bitel

…p with regard to visions reflects its stranglehold on official religion. Since the Council of Trent (1545-63), clerical reformers have struggled to impose a single version of Catholicism on believers, trying their best to regulate doctrine, ritual, ordination, and the behavior of the baptized. For equally as long, they have failed to prevent dissent and religious agency among the faithful, many of whom have demonstrated their dissatisfaction by jo…

Hillary Clinton Feeds the Trolls

By Michael Schulson

…is paradox exists in the realm of mass shootings, too. Acts of random violence often seem, in part, to function as dramatic plays for attention or celebrity status. The Orlando nightclub shooter reportedly checked his phone for news about the shooting during the actual event; the man who murdered hostages at the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery store in Paris last year filmed the attack on a GoPro camera (in that light, the company’s slogan, Be a HERO,…

Grasping At Straws: The Problem with Common Ground on Abortion

By Frances Kissling

…ared by only a small percentage of progressive faith leaders. The constituency includes evangelicals and Catholics whose only area of disagreement is how illegal abortion should be. Both authors come from Catholic groups that have no position on pregnancy prevention via contraception. One of the groups, Network, a lobby of Catholic nuns, has no position on abortion; the other, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, favors making abortion illeg…

From Shofars to Hammers: The Spiritual Warriors of MAGA are ‘ReAwakening’ to Political Violence

By Mark Clatterbuck

…pplause. But underneath it all was a seething groundswell of spiritually sanctioned incitement to violence that was impossible to ignore. The spiritual leaders of this new religio-political movement are using increasingly violent rhetoric to direct an inspired army of God to wage war against all who stand outside their camp. I watched as 4,000 faithful warriors sprang to their feet with each call to arms, roaring their approval, hands outstretched…

The March for Life: Grassroots Movement or Agitprop?

By Patricia Miller

…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…

Yes, It’s Worse To Be Gay in Russia

By Chrissy Stroop

…o dismiss what’s happening in Russia. For my own part, I’m more likely to encounter this sort of false equivalence from socially liberal Russians. I reside in Moscow these days, and most of the Russians I know to any degree of depth have no problem with same-sex relationships—and this includes at least one intellectual who supports the Putin regime and United Russia in general. These Russians can sometimes be surprised by the results of public opi…