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Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

By Haroon Moghul

…oorly reconstructed Ba’athists on the Muslim margins.) Suleiman stressed: “Freeing slaves” is so frequently mentioned as a meritorious act in the Muslim tradition that, in the 8th and 9th centuries, biographies of Prophetic companions cited, as virtues, manumission; Muhammad’s wife, Aisha, was lauded for “freeing six hundred slaves.” All well and good: Muhammad changed what slavery meant, or at least sought to, and the tradition developed in respo…

Confront Death by Avoiding Fritos: The Gluten Lie, Fad Diets, & Foodie Faith

By Michael Schulson

…or our own culture. People ask me, what’s the harm? Why not just go gluten free? And the answer is that going gluten free has all sorts of effects. It affects your relationship with your friends and family. It affects your relationship with your own past and foods that you love. While there might be some culture in which celebratory foods don’t typically contain gluten, that’s not our culture. Do you think there’s an incentive to setting yourself…

The Problem of Evil in Free Market Theology

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…r calculate the economics of grace. Think of that: grace, the paradigmatic free gift, is replaced by the massive edifice of Wall Street number-crunchers and their continual wagering on the future probabilities. As we all know, a lot of money has been made—and lost—this way. Which leads Buchan to his second point: money generates more money, even on Sunday. This is a subtler point, one that he develops specifically in relation to the invention of p…

Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

By Andrew Aghapour

…tisfied customers at restaurants want to get their dish for free, or get a free glass of wine, or a free dessert, because that balances out the input-output equation. So if the customer service agent gives you something, then you feel compensated, then you’re okay, and it’s not such a cognitive puzzle, and also not such a frustration to deal with the amorphous agent of the airline as a whole. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the customer service age…

Free Will, Fate and FiveThirtyEight: The Theology of Election Polls

By Alan Levinovitz and Michael Schulson

…kind of freedom in order to have another. MHS: You mean that you trade the freedom to choose for the freedom of a world that feels unconstrained by predetermined trajectories? AL: Precisely. Which, bizarrely, means that free will is actually more constrained! MHS: Well, that’s kind of the ethic behind big data, right? That, at least in aggregate, decisions that feel like free choice actually follow very clear and pre-determined patterns, and these…

Original Spin: Progressives Dismiss Conservative Theology at Their Peril

By Ira Chernus

…w it, of the truly great evil: the subordination of every kind of personal freedom to the arbitrary will of the government. “Freedom has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline,” he said in his 1957 State of the Union address. “Should we persistently fail to discipline ourselves, eventually there will be increasing pressure on government to redress the failure. By that process freedom will step by step disappear.” Since, in this view,…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…n between this Church and other bodies, there shall arise a more inclusive United Church.” We don’t know if the United Church of Christ is called to die as an institution; but if it is, it will do so called by the Holy Spirit to create space for what may emerge for the sake of a movement we committed to being wholly a part of. What we do know is that this impulse towards an organic unity, fully reflective of what was intended by Jesus when he pray…

Gandhi, his Grandson, Israel, and the Jews

By Shalom Goldman

…ime Minister Yitzhak Shamir signed the order for Awad’s deportation to the United States. In the United States Awad persisted in espousing a non-violent approach to the conflict: “I am one of those people who reminds the Palestinians that the Israeli is a human being. And we must see them, as well as ourselves, as human beings. The more you destroy another human being the more you destroy yourself.” During the Second Intifada, which began in Octob…

DeSantis is a No-Show, the Right’s ‘Secret Sauce,’ and Final Thoughts on Pray Vote Stand

By PRA Staff

…rsonally promised him many years ago that “the court will uphold religious freedom and free exercise…but I don’t know if—but if you [faithful Americans] can uphold it in your daily life and culture.” Brownback seems to tell the crowd that weaponizing the “free exercise” clause will remain a crucial tactic for the Christian Right moving forward. “If you want to have a traditional set of values,” he tells the crowd—“if you just wanna claim life is s…

How America’s Charismatic Christianity Helped Fuel the Fantasyland Presidency of Donald Trump

By Eric C. Miller

…, but there was certainly a great amount of freedom—and not just religious freedom. There was freedom to sell anything you want, to buy anything you want, to be anything you want, to believe anything you want, and to create any kind of religion you want. You may be persecuted for that, as the Mormons were, but if you’re willing to take on that risk, go nuts! So, yes—because we could, we did. That’s part of it. But I’m skeptical that this fully exp…