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Trick or….Bible: Christians Coping with Halloween

By Maxwell Grant

…marked the end of the harvest season, and asked for the protection of the spirit world in order to survive the coming winter. The Church began shifting its liturgical calendars as early as the 9th century in order to get its arms around the day, and to re-present it as the triple holiday of All Hallows Eve, followed by the Feast of All Saints, and then the Feast of All Souls. So it’s neither a new anxiety, nor a new response, for Christian commun…

Glenn Beck’s Fox Show Gets Canned

By Lauri Lebo

…ry. From the Washington Post: Since last August, when he summoned more than 100,000 followers to the Washington mall for the “Restoring Honor” rally, Mr. Beck has lost over a third of his audience on Fox — a greater percentage drop than other hosts at Fox,” David Carr wrote in early March. “True, he fell from the great heights of the health care debate in January 2010, but there has been worrisome erosion — more than one million viewers — especial…

Is Being Trans a Religion? Why the Christian Right Wants You to Think So

By Chrissy Stroop

…istemology whose adherents believe that only those enlightened by the Holy Spirit can perceive the capital-T Truth as presented in the infallible Bible. The “unsaved,” bringing their own presuppositions to the evidence, will come to different conclusions—about the Bible, for example, or about the formation of the Grand Canyon, which the “evolutionist” will see in terms of geologic time, while the creationist will see the impact of Noah’s flood. (A…

Black Lives Matter Activists Disrupt Presidential Candidates at Activist Conference

By Daniel Schultz

…the “All lives matter” slogan that many find objectionable. Some thoughts: 1. Anybody surprised that activists at an activist convention would do activist things is a damn fool. For fuck’s sake, Netroots Nation’s first patron wrote a book titled Crashing the Gates. Of course things get a bit rowdy from time to time. That’s part of the culture. (Perhaps unnecessary disclosure: I came up with the original idea for Yearly Kos, which later morphed in…

Truth or Dare?

By Amina Wadud

…children. I never wanted to know the sex beforehand, and for the most part managed to avoid ultrasounds even for medical reasons until the fifth child at the ripe old age of 37. Having miscarried a child just before that pregnancy and being that age, I was considered an at-risk pregnancy. So they wanted to check on the baby. We insisted we did not want to know what the sex was. So they put that reader where the head was then jumped across the litt…

When Being “Christian” Means Supporting Trump: An Argument For Hiding Your Faith

By Jonathan Malesic

…nihilism is matched only by that of the writer Eric Metaxas. In an October 12 article in the Wall Street Journal, Metaxas writes in apocalyptic terms about a possible Hillary Clinton presidency, assigning her responsibility for things she has no control over, but still claims that “God will not hold us guiltless” if Christians allow her to become president. Never mind the apocalypse a President Trump would unleash. Reno and Metaxas are supposedly…

The Battle for the Meaning of Religious Freedom Day

By Frederick Clarkson

…his: Thomas Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777—fresh from having authored the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He was on roll. But it took years and the later leadership of James Madison to shepherd it through the legislature in 1786. The following year Madison traveled to Philadelphia and served as the principal author of the Constitution. Two years later, he was the principal author of the First Amendment. T…

Our Dance Clubs, Our Churches

By Peter Laarman

…e owned and run by the mob, i.e., the kind of management that knows how to manage things with the cops. When I was young and looked really good in 501s I would spend more late Saturday/early Sunday hours than I care to remember dancing my butt off in rooms where the drinks might be watered but where the music was always hot and no one gave a damn. The Eagle in Exile, across from the old library in DC. The Clubhouse up on 16th Street. Paradise Gara…

Goy to the World: What Does Hanukkah Have to Teach Us About Living in Empire?

By Garret Keizer

…is “force for good” an oxymoron? If so, why? And even so, how does a Roman manage, in practical terms, to say no to Rome? My distant neighbor Thomas Naylor, a former Duke economics professor and more recently the founder of a grassroots movement called “The Second Vermont Republic,” advocates regional secession as a way of diminishing the American empire. In his view there is no reforming of the corrupted Republic, only the possibility of breakawa…

Is This the End of Roe v. Wade And the End of Abortion Rights in the US?

By Chrissy Stroop

…d truly understood the ideological radicalism of the Christian Right in the 1980s, or 1990s or maybe even just ten years ago, perhaps we could somehow have stopped US democracy (such as it is) from going as far off the rails as it has. But it’s too late. Now all we can do is work to protect the vulnerable as we organize and fight to restore our rights in the future. ### This essay first appeared on OpenDemocracy and is republished under Creative C…