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Culture Wars Today, Tomorrow, and Forever?

By Bill Berkowitz

…nt towns and states… [and] even the issues will evolve,” Clarkson pointed out. “But the culture of denial regarding the ongoing potency and significance of the religious right in American public life remains as a stubborn obstacle to meaningful discussion about this powerful movement.” ++++++++++ Ted and Gayle Haggard Play Oprah “Oprah is the closest thing we have to a high priestess of America’s new morality, and she seems obligated to push the p…

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

By Andrew L. Seidel

…aking rules, to the record number of women in Congress, and, perhaps, a shout out to Congress’s first female chaplain. (Yes, Congress has chaplains. We spend $800,000 a year on them.) The problem is that it wasn’t cute, it was divisive. And “awoman” isn’t even a Cleaver original. It’s an old feminist joke, one that crosses cultural lines and stems from the a long tradition of pushing back against patriarchal Christianity. When Elizabeth Cady Stant…

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

…e too. Identity politics is often lambasted as some sort of “Left tactic” but the truth is that the right-wing has used rigid identity groups and categories to maintain power and control existences. While people pore over Harris’ DNA, either to prove that she’s not a quintessentially “American girl” or to see whether she should be invited to next year’s cookout, past and present policies are being ignored, our planet is on fire, the gap between ri…

Partisanship Is The New Civil Religion

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ing to criticisms from within his own party that he seemed to care more about bipartisanship than he did about getting the policies right. Here is a crisis of confidence that has quickly become a crisis of faith. President Obama is entitled to his frustration in the face of what must seem increasingly like a Republican scorched-earth policy. And a quote from Marguerite Yourcenar’s masterful 1954 classic, Memoirs of Hadrian, seems eerily relevant:…

Don’t Blame Black Voters: The Obama Non-Effect

By Jonathan L. Walton

…may think. Let’s be honest! Nobody ever expected to open Ebony and read about Luther Vandross’ marriage to a woman; yet how many African-American houses did Luther’s unmistakable voice turn into a home? Luther is far from alone. Has Prince’s transgender persona hurt his standing among African Americans? Do the gospel melodies of James Cleveland carry any less credibility on Sunday morning? Have not black Christians often looked beyond the, err, “c…

Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…aher shows that he’s actually one of those beings who most likely will be outmoded in the near future: a mind-body dualist; someone who still believes in beliefs and ignores the realities of lived religion as experienced through the body via rituals, practices, storytelling, and symbols. Religion is ultimately not about talking heads around a Real Time table, nor can it be represented as such. Maher’s Freud-like, humorless screed at the end of the…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…is concern to Bell when we spoke on the phone. He responded thoughtfully, but cautiously. “Oh yeah. See the thing is: we actually do have real, life-or-death problems going on. And many of us are totally convinced that this” (he meant the stated reason for the law, the phantom possibility of trans, or fake-trans, people preying on young women in bathrooms) “is not one of them.” True enough, but to say that HB2 is essentially a solution in search o…

Conservative Rep Grills Oklahoma Personhood Sponsors

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…’t seem to have considered that it might be unwise to brag about how much out-of-state money they’re spending in the hopes of changing Oklahoma’s laws, but I suppose we’ll have to see whether that comes back to bite them.) In any event, SB-1433, Oklahoma’s so-called “personhood” bill was recently passed by the House Public Health Committee. And the comments of Rep. Cox, a member of the committee and one of only two doctors in the entire legislatur…

A Tale of Religious Tolerance… On Reddit

By Joanna Piacenza

…ropean_douchebag” apart, castigating him for not only taking a creepy smartphone picture of an innocent young woman, but for taunting her based on her physical appearance—a physical appearance that, in her mind (the only one that matters) is divinely inspired. Of course the woman’s appearance only seems odd to some because of our own culturally mutated and narrow-minded gender norms. The virtual conflict became very real when the anonymous woman g…