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Dear Governor Kasich, Will You Come Lead My Passover Seder?

By Michael Schulson

…e Bible, and not only that—he can swap stories about the Hebrew Scriptures with real-live Hebrews. If that’s the case, then you’re basically using a group of Jews as a campaign prop. But that’s okay! Every politician does it. Plus, Jews love nothing more than to be props in Christian stories. Which is why I’m offering you the best photo-op of all: a leadership role in the Schulson seder. There will be yarmulkes. There will be soup. There will be p…

The Forgotten History of Black Calvinism and the Haunting of American Folk Music

By Joshua Guthman

…’s histories we’re talking about, then anything by John Demos and almost anything by Edmund Morgan, Carlo Ginzburg, and Lyndal Roper. What’s your next book? It’s a story. Or really a series of linked stories. Each is a microhistory of a kind. They all have to do in some way with the subterranean worlds seething beneath what we still glibly call the Second Great Awakening….

Millennials Put Off By Rigid, Judgmental Religion Offered … More Orthodoxy

By Daniel Schultz

…morality afloat than actually helping anyone in need. You’ll notice that Shrum never says a word about service or ministry. It’s all holiness all the time. Unfortunately for churches like Shrum’s, holiness just isn’t very popular in our culture these days. What people want in spirituality is egalitarianism, an emphasis on the ways in which God welcomes, rather than rejects. It’s okay that Shrum or other conservative pastors might say “Sorry, we ca…

Note to CPAC Conservatives: “City [Up]on a Hill” Wasn’t About American Exceptionalism

By Julie Ingersoll

…ch, not only conscience, but mere civil policy, doth bind us. For it is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public… We must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren. The Puritan sense of being God’s chosen people was not put forth by Winthrop as a point of pride, as an early expression of American Exceptionalism, but rather as a warning. Relationship with God brings special responsib…

Meeting on the Bridge: Fr. James Martin’s Ministry to LGBT Catholics Becomes a Book

By Kaya Oakes

…nds in the country happen to be on our side.” And there’s shot of Rosalind Russel with a huge crucifix behind her, and she says, “God is on ours.” And that’s how I often see those things. They think they have God on their side. The comments I get about LGBT issues are the worst by far. It is just shocking how many people think just being LGBT is a sin, how many people think they need to be condemned, and how many people who say “Hate the sin and l…

There’s Nothing Wrong with ‘Prayer’; But There’s Every Reason to be Skeptical of Pence’s Coronavirus Prayer Circle

By Chrissy Stroop

…directly into the nationalist Christian supremacism that’s fueling the destruction of American democracy, such as it was? Or that words like “regular,” “real,” and “normal,” in this context are often code for “conservative white Christians”? Might Merritt have devoted a thought or two to the possibility that American criticism of “thoughts and prayers” responses to real-world problems have everything to do with the fact that right-wing Christians—…

In Latest Round of LGBTQ Discrimination Cases Before SCOTUS, Religion Is ‘The Elephant in the Room’

By Patrick Hornbeck

…country’s first out candidate for the presidency, the Court will hand down rulings that may well decline to expand LGBTQ rights in the context of private-sector employment. It’s likely that the opinions will have little to say about religion, and Tuesday’s arguments only gingerly touched on a topic that evokes passion and pain on all sides. But whichever way the Court rules, it will not resolve the deep conflicts between conservative religious act…

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…ervices over the next days and weeks. Of course as a pastor I’m aware that words of consolation are appropriate and necessary at a time like this. But if actual truth-telling isn’t also appropriate now, I don’t know when it will be. American violence doesn’t emerge from thin air. It has a very specific pedigree in the failed project known as whiteness, with a strong assist from toxic masculinity. We won’t heal unless we can name what’s ailing us….

Recent Debates Highlight Democrats’ Antisemitism Blind Spot—But It’s Not What You Think

By Nylah Burton

…e setting us up to be holding the matches when it goes up in flames. Rabbi Ruttenberg says that “Antisemitism is about pointing fingers at Jewish people, [and is] used by people in power to point at Jews to say ‘it’s them that’s to blame, not us.’ And everybody in the House is aiding and abetting [this narrative].” Ruttenberg also stresses that Democratic support (notably from Sen. Corey Booker) for the anti-BDS bill is “a movement to suppress fre…

SBC’s #MeToo Problem Isn’t a Rotten Apple, It’s a Rotten Theological Tree

By Dianna Anderson

…I believe that the Bible is the inerrant and infallible verbally inspired Word of God. I believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the great news that any sinner who believes in the Lord Jesus Christ will be saved.” A pastor who instructs a wife to submit to her abusive husband—as Patterson did—is therefore not truly following complementarian theology. Any abuse justified by complementarianism, in Mohler’s eyes, is not true complementarianism an…