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Healed of the Sin of Religion: At Church with Sara Miles

By Lisa Webster

…en life and death… It ain’t a party trick! Well, I’m not going to give it away, the way you raise the dead—it’s in the book. But I wanted to ask you to say something more about that image of these beautiful sanctuaries, these worship spaces, that are empty, while a soup kitchen, massed with people, operates in the basement below. That’s a really interesting idea about what holiness is. Is holiness the thing that you don’t touch? Or is holiness cov…

Gay Black Church: An Interview with Bishop Yvette Flunder

By Lisa Webster

…en in the sight of God, could ever be equal. Because the idea goes all the way into eternal life. The way they taught it to the slaves was that baptism frees, say, a white woman from any vestiges of being outside of the ark of safety. She can be fully baptized into the church, but I can’t be fully baptized—not into the same status. And that is because there is something intrinsically subservient, or substandard about me. What were the particulars…

Lo and Behold, the Sacredness of the Internet

By Martyn Smith

…internet as a result of the inexorable working out of Moore’s Law. As the number of transistors on a chip grew exponentially, computers became smaller, and then they became “personal,” and then they fit in our pockets as a phone. “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing,” at the Computer History Museum In this telling, the internet was not a unique “Columbus” event, but an evolution dependent on the shrinking size and growing capacity of co…

Why Egypt is America’s Enemy

By Haroon Moghul

…llow Arabs, demonized and derided for years, such that their blood becomes cheap. This happens all too often with minorities; what is unique about the Arab world is the degree to which many dictatorships also oppress the majority. My point in that essay about Tunisia was that we in America and the West generally reflexively associate secularism with what is good and democratic, and conservatism (specifically, in Islam) with that which is antidemo…

There’s No Business Like the Bible Business: 200 Years of the ABS

By Paul Harvey

…ization central to the cause of making America a Christian nation. While always willing to work with anyone interested in Bible promotion, the ABS, as Fea explains, “has always gravitated towards the particular expression of Christianity that its board and staff believed to be the moral guardians of America’s status as a Christian nation.” A particularly fascinating narrative line of the book is about the ABS’s key role in “innovation, both in Ame…

Why Taxing the Rich is the Godly Thing

By Peter Laarman

…mpounds the injuries of a massive injustice to remain silent—that the only way forward is by breaking open the pretenses and presumptions of the powerful. Sin takes many forms. Sometimes sin arises from failing to know the things that we ought to know. But more often, and especially in regard to social sins, the transgression comes from knowing full well what we need to know and still pretending that we don’t know. In this case we do know full we…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: Missing Voices

By Daniel Ramirez

…er border security, we forget that such measures have grossly inflated the number of undocumented immigrants residing in the US. Half of these used to return to Mexico annually, but researchers now estimate that only one-fourth do so today; stricter border enforcement measures since 1994 have staunched the cyclical flow of the return home of millions. The crisis of 12 million “illegal” immigrants is one of our own creation. The missing clergy coul…

On Eve of Sudan Split Clashes Continue

By Ashley Makar

…splaced civilians trying to leave Abyei are stranded in the rain. The only way south is via dirt roads. William went north, to get an education. “They can break your leg, but they can’t break your mind,” he told me. First, he studied Arabic in Khartoum, so he could learn to protect himself from the Sudanese army and the Misseriya. Then, like thousands of displaced Sudanese, William migrated to Egypt, hoping to be resettled to the West by the UN re…

Despising the Holidays: When Christians Led the ‘War on Christmas’

By Ed Simon

…became the equivalent of a blockbuster. In the chaos of the era print was cheap and plentiful, and the collapse of the licensing laws insured a degree of free speech hitherto unknown in the British Isles. The World Turned Upside Down would prove so enduring that it has been an English folk ballad for more than 350 years. The song’s opening verse, “Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d. /Old Christmas is kicked out of Town” remains per…

Springtime for Ross Douthat?

By Daniel Schultz

…y now), Gustavo Gutierrez, Marcus Borg, James Cone, Sallie McFague, or any number of other thinkers and theologians that Douthat does not recognize. The only people who want to bring back Niebuhr are conservatives. (I’m an admitted fanboy, but that’s about coming from the same church background as Niebuhr as much as anything.) And that doesn’t even get to the worst of it. Douthat misunderstands Francis’ amazing, charismatic realignment of Catholic…