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Dylann Roof Was Wrong: The Race War Isn’t Coming, It’s Here

By Willie James Jennings

…God flows through people like these black families. It does. But I also struggle with the way this word of forgiveness is interpreted in America. It’s used to avoid dealing with the problem of whiteness and the poison-filled faith in competition embedded in it. Christian forgiveness when processed on the American social and political landscape emerges as a kind of rhetorical narcotic, homemade and constantly offered to dull the pain of our racial…

Religion, Lies, and Videotape: Planned Parenthood and the Latest Fake Sting

By Donna Schaper

…borting a fetus is wrong, you can be forgiven it. You don’t need your face rubbed in absurd stories about medical matters. Save your moral dungeons for how much pharmaceutical companies make you pay for pills—not how much research they do on fetal tissue. You don’t want them to pay for fetal tissue? Is that the issue? No. The issue is that you don’t want Planned Parenthood to make money off fetal tissue—which of course they don’t, and aren’t. As u…

Build the Muslim Community Center at Ground Zero

By Donna Schaper

…o. Why? Because it is a sign of hope, forgiveness and peace. These are big words — hope, forgiveness and peace. They rarely have the megaphone that the party of “nope” enjoys. Nevertheless, they are words that religious people need to protect with all our hearts and souls. We too need a department of homeland security and its job is to protect our words. Let’s start with hope. When a tragedy happens, it often steals our hope. The 9-11 bombing is a…

Trump’s Yiddish Trash Talk Launches the Great ‘Schlong’ Debate of 2015

By Peter Manseau

…yn. Thousands of chickens were shlogged that day. If pressed on his use of words, Trump may yet claim to have seen video. As a native New Yorker, Trump is likely more aware of this ritual, and has probably heard more Yiddish, than many Americans. He may have even heard the verb “shlog” used in the context of “beating.” If “schlonged” has indeed become “commonplace” for getting beaten in Trump’s hometown, this may be the reason why. In 1972, for ex…

Updated with Response: The Black Church is Dead—Long Live the Black Church

By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

…he conveniently left out that women played a vital role in that early construction, one even co-editing with W. E. B. Du Bois the pathbreaking The Negro Church in 1903). And now, Eddie Glaude thinks the black church is dead. To the black church… I feel bad for you. My second response was wonder and frustration. How many times do religious historians have to declare a religious entity “dead” only to retract their statements years later, feel embarr…

New York Times Columnist Peter Steinfels’ Letter To RD; With Author Response

By Mark D. Jordan

…eriences with reporters—I have never met Jordan or spoken to him about any news story or column—his experiences ring true. They echo criticisms of reporting on religion that I, along with others, have made many times over—and that he could have regularly encountered in my columns. Indeed, in December I looked back over two decades of writing Beliefs columns in the New York Times. One of my abiding themes, I suggested, had been that “the great worl…

What Role do Feelings Play in Conspiracy, Racism and Climate Denial? Welcome to Phoning It In, Episode 1

By Megan Goodwin

…d I’m not joking here—saying “I deliberately wrote this book using shorter words. I did a word count on the introduction of my first book with Duke, and then I did a character account, and I divided the character count by the word count to come up with the average number of characters per word. And then I did the same with this introduction and I proved mathematically that my words were on average 20% shorter in this book.” That’s how I got 10,000…

Dispatches from the Beltway: Beyond the Graying and Greening Religious Right

By Robert P. Jones

…blical literalists (i.e. believing that the Bible is to be taken literally word for word), compared to nearly three-quarters of the evangelical right. Most significantly for public policy, a majority of left/center evangelicals say the will of the people should be the more important influence on US laws, even when it conflicts with the Bible; while a remarkable 82 percent of the evangelical right hold that the Bible should trump the will of the pe…

The “Marginalization” of Tim Keller: When Anything Short of Adulation Is Oppression

By Anita Little

…ginalized, American Christianity is in serious trouble. He kept using that word “marginalized,” but to quote Inigo Montoya, I don’t think it means what he thinks it means? He later walked back his eyebrow-raising choice via Twitter, saying different wording “might have been more appropriate.” But the blunder was evidence of a growing trend to cry “oppression” when the opinions of influential white men in highly esteemed positions are called into q…

You Are Being Organized by Something: 10 Questions for Kathryn Lofton on Consuming Religion

By Kathryn Lofton

…ly organize themselves in the world and unconsciously are organized by the world. Insofar as ours is a world built by material and immaterial networks and grids, I think we’re missing out if we think of those networks and grids as secular or irreligious. We are missing out insofar as we are missing what I have found as the archival intention of designers. Namely, to organize themselves (and us) into a world they get thereby to organize. The proble…