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Aasif Mandvi on Islamophobia, Acting, and the Long Shadow of Jon Stewart

By Haroon Moghul

…re South Asians, more people from the Middle East, portrayed on television today, as compared to when I started out. But in Hollywood, Caucasian is still the norm. Your heroes are still Caucasian. So that is somewhere we need more diversity, in terms of who’s creating the stories, who’s starring in the stories, who the stories are about. You can have a lot of brown people, but if the story’s really about white people, then it’s diversity, but not…

The Theology That Inspired the Poway Synagogue Shooting (and New Zealand) Remains Strikingly Commonplace

By Ivan Strenski

…mented memory of supersessionism at their disposal, Catholic intransigents today never tire of calling out this uneasy disjunction between a dense supersessionist past and a shallow progressivist present. Finally, what does the Orthodox Presbyterian rejection of moves like the Vatican’s decision to squelch supersessionism tell us? Does it warn of an excess of theological subtlety and complexity? Does it speak to an appetite of the popular religiou…

To Be Queer, Gifted, and Black: A Conversation with Theologian Pamela Lightsey

By Nyasha Junior

…h, I’m still trying to pull out what it means to be black and LGBTQ in the world today. I’m really curious as to how faith impacts the LGBTQ community to do social justice work. How does your faith influence your activism? That’s the next step I want to take. I also want to continue working in the Black Lives Matter movement, but I’m also rolling around in my head how to bring the intersections of oppression more vividly to the forefront in my nex…

Fascinating History of Search for “Lost White Tribe” Sheds Light on Construction of Race

By Michael Schulson

…. Robinson Oxford University Press, April 2016 This premise isn’t exactly true; race is a construct—a shifting template created by human beings and applied to human bodies. To be clear, constructs are real. Racial categories are meaningful to anyone who lives within them (i.e. everyone), and this whole conversation could sound utterly irrelevant to, say, a black woman who’s just been pulled over by the police. Still, not to get too circular here,…

Mormon-Born Daya Mata Typifies American Yoga

By Andrea R. Jain

…n encouraging members of the Self-Realization Fellowship to enter into a guru-disciple relationship with the official gurus of the tradition, including Babaji, Krishna, and Jesus, as well as Yogananda himself. She taught that the gurus, having attained loving union with God, could help their disciples attain that same goal. Having taken the vow of renunciation, Daya Mata prescribed that path for those who, like her, wanted to devote their entire l…

Religious Freedom Gets Hollywood Treatment

By Daniel Ramirez

…rch’s stance against modernity (e.g., public schools without religious instruction, civil marriages, etc.). The rapprochement between longtime dictator Porﬁrio Díaz’s creaky regime and the Catholic Church united liberals, Masons, anarchists, Protestants, and Catholics (the vast majority of revolutionaries were Catholic) in opposition to the dictator’s perennial re-election, and heightened their distrust of the prelates and their uneven application…

The Tense History Behind Jimmy Carter’s Liberty U. Commencement Address

By John Fea

…e decide whether we tell the truth, or benefit from telling lies. We decide, do I hate, or am I filled with love? We’re the ones who decide: do I think only about myself or do I care for others?” Carter delivered a gentle, yet powerful, exhortation to a Christian university run by one of Donald Trump’s chief evangelical surrogates. At one point during his address he identified himself as an “evangelical Christian.” At ninety-three years old, he is…

The Tragedy of Religious Freedom

By Patrick Hornbeck

…ation, it would be unfair for civil courts to allow the Episcopal Church’s rules to trump state law. The breakaway diocese has appealed to the Supreme Court, which recently asked the national church to reply. In a word, all these cases are about self-determination—the capacity of a religious institution to decide for itself what it means to be complicit in what it views as sin, to legally identify as a religious institution, or to retain property…

A Writer’s Murder Raises Fears of Death-by-Decree

By Shalom Goldman

…probate who insulted the Prophet to hell.” And one of the official Iranian newspapers wrote approvingly that “Azerbaijan’s Salman Rushdie is dead.” As 70% of Azerbaijanis are Shia with allegiances to the Iranian clergy, it did not prove difficult to incite someone to murder Rafiq Tagi. In December seven prominent intellectuals called on the European Union to investigate the circumstances of Tagi’s death. Among them were Taslima Nasrin, Richard Daw…

Better Dead Than ‘Fed’: Behind Palin’s Dig at ‘Unbiblical’ Fed

By Julie Ingersoll

…ivil government to punishing “evildoers” and providing for defense. Reconstructionist theocracy, based on the Reconstructionists’ reading of the Bible, gives coercive authority to families and churches to organize other aspects of life. In this view—one that also meshes with Tea Party rhetoric—the Fed’s control of monetary policy is a prime example of federal government “tyranny.” North argues that the Federal Reserve is unbiblical because it usur…