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House GOP Hires Lawyer to Prevent Federal Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

Since the Obama Administration said it would no longer defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) House Republicans have resorted to hiring George W. Bush’s former Solicitor General to defend the 1996 law declaring that marriage is between one man and one woman. Paul Clement has appeared before the Supreme Court several times including an appearance to defend Bush’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiativ…

The Social Science Animal: Brooks Argues for Emotion over Reason

By Beatrice Marovich

…book he called Émile: or, On Education. This treatise—whose utopian propositions would go on to inspire figures in both the French and American revolutions—was not modest about its aims. Rousseau promised to do nothing less than shape the very destiny and life journey of his human reader. “To live is the trade I will teach him,” Rousseau baldly proclaimed. “On leaving my hands,” he continued, “he will be a man; and all that a man ought to be.” Fo…

Possible Heir to Dalai Lama Cleared of Corruption Charges

By Tsering Namgyal

…gnized by the Dalai Lama as the 17th Karmapa, a top spot in the Tibetan religious hierarchy of reincarnated leaders, has been caught up for the past month in a surprising scandal. But the real interest of it is not the crime the Karmapa and his community were accused of (warehousing Chinese money in monks’ dwellings) but why the Indian government, host to Tibet’s exiled spiritual leadership, chose to target him. For many observers, the widely-hype…

Four Reasons Why Egypt’s Revolution Is Islamic

By Zaid Hassan

…owever, that whatever happens, the Mubarak Era is over. In the words of political scientist, Abdelwahab El-Affendi, “If the societies we live in constrain us in the same way as gravity, there is still room for us to look beyond the horizon. A Muslim’s faith is the shuttle he mounts to escape the confines of narrow realism.” As events unfold like a collapsing dam in North Africa and the Middle East, the questions flow. What is the nature of the rev…

Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…that both penances were accepted. Penance, an application released for the iPhone in early December, allows users to absolve one another’s sins. After passing the application’s obligatory security PIN system (conventional online security measures are the app’s primary faith-orientation), you come to an interface resembling a confessional booth. Through the left door you can “confess,” offering your sins to whoever is listening; behind the closed d…

Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

I read Going Rogue on an airplane while jetting across the continent to visit the author’s church, Wasilla Bible Church. I remember pulling the book surreptitiously out of my satchel and opening the cover with some mixture of dread and resignation, figuring that I might someday be able to make a case that the hours spent reading the book should count as a credit toward Purgatory. The autobiography was, as I suspected, pretty insubstantial, filled…

Note for Today

By Amina Wadud

…to do it again at this age. But then, I may not have considered it as significant. Waiting so long really makes it seem so phenomenal. Here are a few things I would think about if I could do it over: The Buddy System I was supposed to go with a friend, who it turned out could not come once we got to the planning stage. But she wasn’t the only person I wish I could go with. I wish I could afford to have one of my sons with me. That would take care…

A Truly Fearless Human Being: Rev. Howard Moody, 1921-2012

By Tom Davis

…his is not a heritage that would seem to produce a man extraordinarily sensitive to the feelings and the lives of women, but that he was. In 1957, the first year of his stay as pastor at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan, a former Judson minister living in Florida referred a pregnant woman to him. She was seeking an abortion—a single mother of three teenaged children. A member of his church helped him locate an “abortionist” operating in New Jer…

The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

By Frederick Clarkson

…lled discourse of its time. Warning that people might have to “take responsibility for any incitement that [the person’s words] may cause,” Pelosi could scarcely have come up with a better example to illustrate a major theme of David Neiwert’s latest book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. There has been much discussion of the culture of incivility lately, epitomized by the recent indecorous outbursts of Rep. Joe “…

Of Zionism and Anti-Zionism: The Ultra Orthodox and the Settler Movement in Israel

By Shaul Magid

Israel is not only engaged in a fierce battle with the Palestinians over questions of territory and sovereignty, it is also engaged in a critical struggle over its own identity: what kind of society does it want to be? In the course of this struggle, odd alliances have been forged; one of the most unlikely being the one between the Haredim, or Ultra Orthodox, and the Settler movement. To understand what makes this alliance so unexpected, and what…