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An Open Letter to Black Clergy on the Disdain for Protest

…ed communion with military precision, talked back to you. In what W.E.B Du Bois named “the Frenzy,” the gathered responded: “Yes Sir,” “Go ‘head, Doc,” and my personal favorite—“You in the book.” With the turn of a phrase, your homilies could turn despair into hope. After you had cooled anxieties—stirring souls with Holy Ghost fire—we would retire to your offices where pictures of Martin Luther King adorned the walls. I so wanted to be like you. C…

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‘We’re all in this together’: The Perils of Kumbaya Rhetoric

Talk is cheap, and sentimental talk cheapens public discourse in dangerous ways at a time when total sobriety is required. Eight weeks into a public health and economic catastrophe, the facts before us should be sobering enough: Disease and death in this pandemic overwhelmingly afflict communities of color (e.g. despite making up just a third of the state’s population, 70% of the dead in Louisiana have been African American; in Michigan the numbe…

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The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

…her book is published that way except encyclopedias, dictionaries, and telephone books. You don’t want to read those books, you go to them for authoritative answers and you don’t argue with the dictionary. If you’re playing Scrabble you go to the dictionary to settle the argument. We’ve encouraged people to think about the Bible as this kind of book, a source of authority, the final word, not to be debated. I think that helps people to think that…

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A Shining City: The Occupy Movement and the American Soul

…der dresses and ridiculously high-heeled shoes. They sipped from splits of cheap sparkling wine while their tuxedoed companions swilled the local brew, Budweiser—that, too, a faded American icon, sold off in 2008 to the Belgium-based multinational, InBev. No, of course, these were not the protesters who have begun to appear in more and more American cities, but keepers of the once-stable base of a certain version of the fabled American Dream: wedd…

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Richard Dawkins’ Atheist Academy of Unguided Truth

…God loves you because your priest told you so? And so on.  These were not cheap shots. He was serious. He loved us, he loved his job, and his questions were troubling. Some students wept. At which point he would offer Kleenexes. It was in Fr. Cavanaugh’s class that I began to see that all true education is intensely personal. Dawkins’ distaste for an officially atheist academy may be mere iconoclasm. But maybe not. Maybe it’s closer to the truth…

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Gas For Two Bucks a Gallon? Bachmann Taps a Pipeline to the American Sacred

…e heady days of $2 a gallon gasoline. When Bachmann promised the return of cheap fuel, she tapped into that mythic connection between Americans and their cars. It isn’t simply that American’s worship the car or make it a sacred object; although one could not be blamed for thinking so. The Los Angeles Times reports that Americans spend almost 100 billion a year on new car purchases alone, not counting used car purchases or maintenance of existing c…

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Fear of a Catholic Ghetto

…te the backstory there. Haley’s use of the phrase “Catholic ghetto” is not cheap hyperbole, if you consider the history of Catholics in the United States. The US Catholic hospital system grew up in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; largely under the care of women’s religious orders, and largely to serve the poor. (Read about a few of the women who helped build Catholic health care.) The surrounding cultural landscape could be pr…

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On Eve of Sudan Split Clashes Continue

…disarm. “All of these people, they are fighting. They are firing. They are boiling inside,” William Maddeng, a Southern Sudanese refugee said. “You can’t stop it.” William left his home near Abyei during the civil war. He and his brothers ran 30 kilometers into the Nuba Mountains to escape Northern troops in the late 1990s. Now, with the Sudanese army dropping bombs on South Kordofan, and hundreds of civilians running for cover in Nuba Mountain ca…

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Build the Muslim Community Center at Ground Zero

…hese 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 terrible tragedy. It is a tragedy with causes in a larger hum…

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