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Culture Wars Today, Tomorrow, and Forever?

By Bill Berkowitz

Culture Wars Today, Culture Wars Tomorrow, Culture Wars Forever At a Super Bowl party at my friend Al’s house, I was standing in the kitchen ladling some of my wife’s extraordinary chili into a bowl, when a friend asked what I was going to write about now that the Christian right is defeated and demoralized. Rushing to get back into the living room for third quarter action, I mumbled that I wasn’t worried about not having the Christian Right to w…

Rep. Cleaver’s ‘Awoman’ Prayer Enrages Christian Nationalists Who Taste Their Own Medicine and Still Miss the Point

By Andrew L. Seidel

Amen and awoman. Exclusion and inclusion. Division and diversity. Religion and nonreligion. Rep. Cleaver (D-MO) ignited these flammable dichotomies delivering the House’s opening prayer for this session and ending it: “We ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and God known by many names and by many different faiths. Amen, and awoman.” The prayer might have been written by Saul Bellow’s Good Intentions Paving Company. But good intent…

Trump is Helping the Economy… The Apocalypse Economy

By Jonathan Root

Jim Bakker misses his days as the head of Heritage USA—especially the amphitheater, the water park, and the train. On a recent episode of his TV show, the televangelist complained that the government had unjustly taken his Christian theme park away from him in 1989, after he was convicted of mail and wire fraud. But now things are looking up for Bakker. For the first time in years, he explained, “I can honestly say the vision I had fifty years ag…

The Burning Houses of Worship We Missed

By Gordon Haber

…g District of Western China, where officials have reportedly bulldozed over 800 mosques. Authorities have also detained hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in re-education camps. The scale of the suffering is difficult to imagine. In fairness, there’s been a lot of good reporting about the plight of the Uighurs. And yet I believe the outpouring of emotion for more recognizable places—especially Notre Dame—is instructive. Samuel Johnson defined sympat…

The Right Questions Kamala Harris’ Blackness — Yet as Long as She Holds Any Power She’ll Always Be Too Black for Them

By Mary Rambaran-Olm

…ategy memo she’s painted as: a middle-aged hag who lives in a cave with her 800 cats; unqualified to lead because her womb’s as empty as Jesus’ tomb; and hatching a master plan to suppress the aromatic scent of electricity. If I weren’t merely an outside agitator, I’d be sure to only cast my ballot for someone who’s birthed their own children, just like all the previous presid— wait, what? Anyway, Kamala cackles like Satan or something. You see, i…

Partisanship Is The New Civil Religion

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…rtisan politics. The devotional speaker who had been invited to address the 800-plus crowd that evening spoke mainly about the need for Christians to think and act “eschatologically,” orienting their practices always to their vision of ultimate reconciliation which is portrayed as the eschatological banquet of God. Then she used an example to drive the radical nature of Christian reconciliation home to her audience. She was born and raised a Democ…

Why Faith Needs Redemptive Struggle to Be Meaningful

By Liz Theoharis

I have had the honor of working extensively with the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, beginning when he keynoted the launch of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice in November 2013. It has been a fruitful partnership in all respects. In his new book, Rev. Barber reminds us of the importance of education and history in the long struggle for justice and righteousness. Referring to how those in power kept the poor divided in histor…

Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

By Arthur Waskow

…reedom Seder in the basement of a Black church in Washington DC, with about 800 people, Jews and Christians, Black and white. It was not only my engagement with the Jewish text, with all the Jewish texts, that “rewrote” me. It was also my engagement with other Jews who were rewriting themselves, my engagement with communities that came together in the very process of wrestling with these texts. For indeed, it turned out that others were entering t…

Clergy May Soon Find Taxes Soaring As Result of an Under-the-Radar Ruling

By Patrick Hornbeck

Relatively little fanfare accompanied U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb’s ruling in October that a tax exemption for clergy housing dating back to 1954 violates the First Amendment. Crabb confirmed her ruling in the case Gaylor v. Mnuchin this past Wednesday, declaring unconstitutional a provision of the tax code that’s made it possible for clergy to enjoy higher standards of living than their salaries might suggest. At issue is section 107 of th…

Milquetoast Liberal Religion Won’t Challenge Conservative Values: A History Lesson

By Sheila D. Collins

…arge part of the Great Plains, restored wildlife and built a system of over 800 state and county parks. They electrified an entire region of the country, bringing what had been America’s “Third World” up to 20th century standards. They created works of art, gave concerts, set up theaters throughout the country, ran nursery schools, served over 1.2 billion school lunches to needy children, gave immunizations, taught illiterate adults to read and wr…