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Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…on. This is certainly something Americans in the age of Glenn Beck and the Texas history standards controversy could benefit from. While scholars are quick to criticize the limitations of the documentary genre, I am not sure that producing a series like this is, at its root, really that much different from what we do in our work. I, for example, begin each of my lectures with a PowerPoint slide that lists the three main themes I will cover that da…

With Methodist LGBTQ Vote and GOP Support for Trump, White Protestantism Has Hit Bottom

By Peter Laarman

…ose reading of Scripture is cramped, at best. Seen in this context, it’s a cheap dodge for liberals within the UMC to blame churches and delegates from the Global South for the vote to retain (and even heighten) the denomination’s ban on all things queer. Yes, the UMC does have a much heavier Global South representation in its governance than any of the other “sisters”; fully 41% of the delegates in St. Louis represented churches outside of the Un…

Israel’s Immigration Debate: “Where is the Jewish Spirit?”

By Mati Wagner

…rocess their discriminatory work permits. These “guest” workers, who today number between 250,000 and 400,000 (half of whom are illegal) did not only toil. They fell in love and established families and had children, probably more than 2,000 children, who were sent to state-run schools like Tel Aviv’s Bialik-Rogozin to learn with young Israelis their age to read, to write and to add and subtract—in Hebrew. They also were taught about the miraculou…

Gen X, Gadgets, and God

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ay weekend during which the faithful had to opportunity to have their smartphones, laptops, and other mobile electronic devices blessed. In a similar vein, earlier this year, a Methodist church in Texas began offering special worship packets for children that include MP3 players so that they are able to “hear the gospel in their own child language.” Both of these efforts recognize a shift in the use of technology in the lives of ordinary believers…

Where’s Wallnau? A NAR Apostle Takes Aim at Swing Counties in ‘The Battle for the Mountain of Government’

By Frederick Clarkson

…gence apps” including As One America, which contains the name, address and phone number of Christian neighbors “who are not showing up to vote or who are not registered.” He then showed a map with big red arrows pointing to precincts “within striking distance” from Vida Church to the precincts that are “where the devil’s got a stronghold that God wants to break up.” The app was developed by Superfeed Technologies, which has also designed apps for…

These Are the New Battlegrounds for LGBT Rights Under Trump

By Sunnivie Brydum

…y into state law a faith-based “right to discriminate,” and, in Kansas and Texas, grant a $2,000 reward for cisgender students who “caught” a transgender student sharing the bathroom with them. That was the state of affairs even with a professed friend to LGBT folks in the White House. But that kind of municipal involvement is going to be our best bet to resist Trump’s agenda. While it may seem counter-intuitive to focus a national resistance on r…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…cation, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourg…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…s I watched talented African American actors hamming up “African-ness” for cheap laughs. It brought to mind the long, shameful history of Americans—black and white—performing blackness (often in blackface) on stage for white audiences. The Book of Mormon wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of The Lion King and its African stereotypes by substituting more authentic stereotypes. It wants to be transgressive and conventional, blasphemous…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…

Presidential Pep Talks and the Religion of Fear: How did an Uncontroversial Speech Become a National Controversy?

By Eric Reitan

…d. And in response to the controversy and the barrage of outraged parental phone calls, many school systems decided it was safest not to air the speech at all. Others required that alternative activities be arranged for children whose parents refused to permit their kids to be subjected to an encouraging presidential pep talk. The evening after the talk, the local news station I was watching aired a report on the event, complete with footage of a…