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

By Andrew L. Seidel

…fetish of their choosing. But they should not do so with a government microphone, and not on the taxpayers’ time and dime. We’ve seen plenty of divisive prayers from the conservative side. Often deliberately so, wielding prayer like a cudgel. The Pennsylvania legislator’s Jesus-laden, jaw-dropping prayer uttered to intimidate the state’s first female Muslim legislator. A preacher echoed this prayer, telling the Virginia House of Delegates that “ev…

Are School Districts Getting the Message on Government-Sponsored Prayer?

By Lauri Lebo

There’s an old joke in newsrooms that goes if you can find three examples of something, it’s automatically worthy of a trend story. And so, according to the rule, it’s too early to call this a trend. Still, it is interesting that two news stories came out yesterday about school districts ending government-endorsed religious observances because they recognize that they would probably lose a costly First Amendment battle. Could it be that in the wa…

The Radical Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Left’s Challenge Today

By Peter Laarman

…ms to be more or less okay with dropping $6.4 trillion—and killing at least 800,000 people—in an ineffective and counterproductive “war on terror.” When will we understand that defunding the police and defunding the Pentagon reflect one and the same struggle?) Finally, given how the practice of radical nonviolence implies a willingness to sacrifice, how much are you personally willing to sacrifice for the achievement of the long-awaited radical re…

Thoreau’s Ferocious Critique of Philanthropy Does Not Make Him “Selfish”

By Alda Balthrop-Lewis

…abwe, just as overlooked and beleaguered… Big companies have always sought cheaper labor, moving from North to South in the United States, looking for the hungriest, the most desperate, the least organized, the most exploitable. Press coverage of conditions in Apple’s factories in China has been anything but glowing. Yet when Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, says he’ll give his personal wealth to charities of his choice (many of them in Silicon Valley), he…

Catholic Church Ordained Women Before, Can Do it Again

By Phyllis Zagano

…e trajectory of deacon-priest-bishop is relatively recent—only about 700 or 800 years in the long history of the Church. In fact, the earlier understanding is that the deacon would become a bishop! I sometimes wonder if the naysayers are more afraid of women bishops than of women priests. But, in modern times, we have reestablished the tradition of a diaconate lived permanently. All priests are also ordained deacons, and in the most formal of litu…

My God, David Brooks

By John Modern

…t is almost invisible outside the academic world because the text is nearly 800 pages of dense, jargon-filled prose.” Rest assured, we do not need to read Taylor for ourselves because David Brooks can be trusted. His ongoing effort to distill for us the density of jargon is a choice well-honed. The result: a column that we have chosen to read (again, wisely) and, moreover, a readerly choice that becomes a sign to others and ourselves that we are a…

Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

By Andrew Aghapour

…s pretty much it. Evangelical leaders themselves didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on convert…

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

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…pages I’ll confine myself to Religulous.) This is the kind of thing a fair number of my students, raised in the Protestant-dominated United States (even Catholics and Jews have assimilated this definition), come to university thinking about religion; the two key components of which are “belief” and “God.” Religion is some cryptic interior, individual thing that exists in one’s own head, and is only understood in relation to a God. I don’t blame my…

Hajj Journal: Door Number 89: The Door with No Name

By Amina Wadud

…d inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out af…

Is It OK To Use a Cellphone in Church? Pew Surveys the New Etiquette

By Michael Schulson

…, speculating, and damn, those kids are all doing x, y, and z on their cellphones, and it’s an outrage! Pew’s study of cellphone etiquette gives us one way to begin digging into a much larger set of questions: which norms do we, and should we, place around the use of digital tools? When are these opinions just personal preferences, and when do they take on a more explicit ethical dimension? When should we enforce them? Part of the problem is that…