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Whatever COVID-19 Brings, This Chaplain Wants You to Remember That the Death Rate is Ultimately 100%

By J. Dana Trent

…offered to these conversations in the public square, as is evident in the New York Times’ ‘Death and Dying’ series with Dr. George Yancy. But even in the face of pandemic, we still search only for cures in lieu of meaning. Is there anything you had to leave out? It was clear to my editor that the earliest manuscript draft was actually three books: a personal narrative of a daughter’s grief; a chaplaincy memoir of an interfaith minister; and an in…

Can Poetry Heal the Planet?

By Gary Gach

…’s return to poetry… and global, as in global warming. In the mountains of New Mexico where he lives, there’s been little rain for eight years. 40% of forests have been lost. It also evokes poetry’s shamanic lineage, extending back to humankind’s earliest rain-bringers and tribal healers. In the Edo period of Japan, for instance, Kikaku, a close disciple of Zen haiku master Basho, reputedly ended drought by reciting poetry. The flipside of drought…

Ramadan: Third Day is the Charm

By Amina Wadud

…he intention was to eat it all, in addition to our family traditional fast-breaking fruit salad, the meal that followed prayer, and then the stash. But the stomach was NOT having it. There it was every chip, every cookie, every piece of cake, every bit of candy, waiting and now permissible, but the stomach just could not hold as much as the eye had coveted during the daylight hours. I don’t know if children who do not fast have this experience — y…

Marriage Equality Coming To Taiwan In Spite of Religious Objectors?; Anti-Gay Ruling Sought By Indonesian Islamists Threatens Women & Poor Couples; LDS Church Launches New ‘Mormon and Gay’ Site; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ysis of the letter’s continuing impact. The Obama administration adopted a new rule banning US Agency for International Development contractors from discriminating against LGBT people in the provision of services. The rule does not bar discrimination in employment; groups working overseas are exempted from a 2014 executive order against job discrimination by federal contractors. Analysis from BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder: It’s not immediately clear how…

What We Need to Understand is that Fascism is Intersectional and Erotic—’Thy Rod is Thy Gun,’ With a Hip-Thrust

By Annika Brockschmidt

…here’s one, Ulrich von Gienanth. And I wonder—do these guys show up in the New York Times? [It turns out that] their deportation made banner headlines. They were running the SS operations in the United States, probably participating in far more extensive sabotage within the United States leading up to the war. Then, much more contemporary memory hits: Nazis were blowing shit up in America and recruiting folks. That’s who this organization brought…

Updated with Response: The Black Church is Dead—Long Live the Black Church

By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

…is Christian (or religious, more generally) about this conversation? The “new cultural politics of difference” proffered by Cornel West, bell hooks and others certainly breathed life into debates about differentiated black identities during the 1990s; and it continues to do so. But post-black church claims raise more specific questions regarding what is constitutive of black Christianities in the post-Civil Rights era? More specifically, what wil…

To Get Hebdo Cartoons You Must Get Laïcité

By Stephanie Frank

…the two terms have different meanings, different histories, and different politics. Where secularism sprung from a sort of détente, laïcité began from an attack on entrenched power; where secularism has been bound up from the beginning with a protection of—even a celebration of—difference, laïcité has been bound up with an impulse to level difference; where secularism is associated with state “neutrality,” laïcité is associated with a state agend…

“Reason to Worry”: An Anti-Semitism Scholar Opens Up on Trump, Misogyny and the Future of Anti-Judaism

By Michael Schulson

…built out of a real Jew. A while ago, Chris Rock did a long interview with New York magazine. Rock started talking about how he would cover racism in the U.S. if he were a journalist. He said—I’m paraphrasing here—that when journalists want to cover racism, they usually go and talk to black people. But black people are not the source of the problem! White people are. Rock said that he’d do a piece about racism where he only interviewed white peopl…

Anti-Gay Forces On Offense in Europe; ‘African Islam’ Challenged by Extremists; Irish Marriage Foes & ‘Sounds of Sodomy’; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…the Offensive’ Cato Institute analyst Dalibor Rohac wrote last week in the New York Times that while “it is probably just a matter of time until gay unions and same-sex adoptions become palatable to most Slovaks, opponents of these reforms have launched a pre-emptive assault to make these reforms legally and politically costly.” Last year a constitutional amendment was adopted to defined marriage as a union “solely between man and woman,”and Rohac…

Top Ten Religion & Science Stories of 2009

By Lauri Lebo

…human hand. Accompanied by former child actor Kirk Cameron, Comfort led a crusade at college campuses across the country to distribute altered copies of Origin. Comfort penned an introduction for the new version in which he quotes from Mein Kampf in order to link Darwin to Adolf Hitler, accuses Darwin of being sexist, and argues falsely that there are no transitional fossils in the fossil record. So, in the assessment of the top stories that inter…