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The Sacramental American Day of Thanks

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…mplication that indigenous Americans were Canaanites, and thus fit for destruction). The Civil War provided the American civil religion with a new dimension of more explicitly Christian symbolism: the original sin of human enslavement was overcome only through the punitive bloodbath of civil war and the Christ-like sacrifice of the blood of the then-US President, Abraham Lincoln (Gary Laderman’s important book, The Sacred Remains, tells the distur…

This is not a Religion Column: Biblical Capitalism

By Jeff Sharlet

…s in penthouses and beach houses and a ranch down in Crawford. +++ Read more about the economy and free market fundamentalism: In Markets We Trust, Peter Laarman Faith-Based Bailout, Louis A. Ruprecht…

RDPulpit: Rick Warren and the Limits of Empathy

By Tom Davis

U.S. News and World Report named him one of the top 25 leaders in America. Time magazine saw him as one of “Fifteen People Who Mattered Most in 2004.” Completing the trifecta, Newsweek put him on the list of “Fifteen People Who Make America Great.” By these and other measures, the Reverend Rick Warren is an impressive minister. He has created and supports foundations which do much good in the world, particularly among the poor of Africa. He is a…

This is Not a Religion Column: The Audacity of Compromise…

By Jeff Sharlet

…ut first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” That’s a deeper, more democratic understanding of responsibility than anything we heard in Denver. Obama has achieved something remarkable — he has restored liberalism to the political mainstream. But he has done so by abandoning liberation. Obama’s defenders insist he’s just doing what he has to do to win, and perhaps they’re right. Too ba…

RDBook: Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa

By Luke Ssemakula

…o independence but resulted into autocracy for most of Africa; next, the struggle against one-partyism and military rule in the late eighties and the nineties that resulted into political pluralism but still fell short of consolidating democracy (because the elected leaders were corrupted by power); and finally, the ongoing struggle against presidential third-termism (an attempt by some politicians to amend their countries’ constitutions to remove…

King as Inspiration, Not Guide

By William D. Hart

…rsty, and racist foreign policy (“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is] my own government.”) that makes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright sound like that elderly, goatee-wearing, and uncritical booster of American patriotism named “Uncle Sam.” Toward the end of his life, he was not intimidated by those who questioned his patriotism. He realized that “patriotism” is a mistake, an ethical lapse of judgment; indeed, it is the last refu…

Israel Claims Holy Sites, Reignites Religious Flashpoint

By Orly Halpern

…it was a mosque. Permission to pray inside depended on which religion and ruler was in power at the time. Crusaders prevented Muslims from praying inside, but when Salahaddin conquered the land, he allowed Christians to enter. When the Muslim Mamluks took over they prohibited non-Muslims from entering. Jews were only allowed to get as close as the seventh step to the mosque entrance. This arrangement continued during the Ottoman era and British M…

Funding of Creationist Organizations Doubles

By Lauri Lebo

…esis remains the big boy in the business, far ahead of Creation Ministries International (from which AIG split a few years ago) and Institute for Creation Institute. AIG is the owner of the Kentucky-based Creation Museum, which features saddle-wearing dinosaurs and a recreation of Noah’s Ark built to biblical scale. Sadly, the gross revenue of National Center for Science Education, the primary defender of public education from anti-science attacks…

Evangelical Islamophobia as American as Apple Pie

By Shalom Goldman

…the mid-nineteenth century the American Protestant call to ‘Evangelize the World’—a call linked to emerging American Imperial power aspirations—met its greatest challenge in the Muslim world. In a 1906 meeting in Cairo twenty-nine American and European missionary groups met to plan “the Evangelization of the Moslem world in this generation.” A follow-up conference in Lucknow in 1911 called for the Christianization of the Muslims of India. More rec…

Barakah: Blessings Without Numbers

By Amina Wadud

…ood, so why not go with the winning formula? In 2004 I participated in the international forum on HIV/AIDS and Islam. Well it was one of the worst experiences of my public life as a Muslim but from it came with lots of good, by way of vital relations with the LBGTQ community of Muslims, so I won’t dwell on the bad part. I will leave that part and maybe it is only a one-on-one compensation, who knows. A few things disturbed some of my literalists,…