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The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…e will leave when a tragedy comes. Fundamentalist churches don’t tend to last past the charismatic pastor that got them started. Christianity is not supposed to make you secure. Christianity is supposed to give you the courage to walk into an insecure world knowing that you’re not alone and to embrace the radical insecurity. If you’ve got to spend your time proving that you’re better than someone else—males are better than females, whites are bett…

In a Time of Irrational Fear and New Media: The Deadly ‘Dance Plague’ at 500

By Ed Simon

…er bites. Regarding such comparisons, Barbara Ehrenreich in Dancing in the Street: A History of Collective Joy reasons that “rye does not grow in Italy, nor do tarantulas menace Germans,” concluding that nothing ingested has been “found to induce anything resembling dancing mania.” Witnessing the Strasbourg pandemonium, and without better explanation, the German humanist Otto Brunfuls compared it to a variant of ancient Dionysian cults that would…

Changing the Jewish State and the State of Jews: J Street and the Future of Israel

By Mark LeVine

…tnessing a lot of suffering and broken promises, my father instinctively distrusted anyone who pressed their case too hard and painted too rosy a picture of reality. He also felt there were enough problems in his own community that needed to be addressed to devote too much energy to his ancestral homeland. Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestinian requires a new Jewish Identity My father would have been Michael Oren’s worst nightmare. Oren, the current Israe…

Fear of a Catholic Ghetto

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…c Catholic identity? Say it with me, class: No artificial contraception! Most Protestant church bodies in the United States have come to approve of contraception under some circumstances. The Roman Catholic Church has not. I mean, not officially. If you are inclined to think of the Catholic Church as the church which has stayed faithful while other schismatic sects have veered from the truth, that will likely strike you as significant. Some of th…

Can I Get Some Birth Control Pills With That Slushie?: Unpacking the Contraceptive Mandate Rollback

By Sunnivie Brydum

…merican who happens to have a uterus. But the rambling draft rule—which is still listed as pending on OBM’s website and which seems to have wholly skipped the requisite public comment period—is part of a larger, broader campaign waged by the Trump Administration and its right-wing allies. To unpack the deep historical, religious, and conservative culture war roots of this sweeping effort to roll back access to safe, effective birth control, I turn…

Why The Advocate‘s Choice of Pope Francis for Person of the Year is a Mistake

By Anthea Butler

…c and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.” What Pope Francis is doing is walking a tightrope. Instead of pushing dogma, he’s pushing a change in tone, not in substance. Because he is carefully eliding the church’s teaching and focusing on compassion, many liberals and media pundits—including Th…

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

By Jonathan Malesic

…Bush’s presidency, when I wrote the book. Since then, I have rethought my strong stance in favor of secrecy. But the deep problem remains the same: by identifying their faith so strongly with politics, conservative Christians have married their self-understanding to the fortunes of the Republican Party’s presidential candidates. Even if that candidate manifestly aims only at self-aggrandizement, well, so be it. In the Bush years, conservative Chr…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…acuum come restrictionist voices that frame the issue in purely individualistic, ahistoric terms: hordes of immigrants are coming in, willfully breaking our laws, selfishly taking advantage of this country’s freedoms and resources. Here the word “illegal” becomes a rallying cry to mobilize opposition to any attempt to rethink immigration policy beyond increased militarization of the border and domestic enforcement. This simplistic but effective fr…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: “They Came at Night, Trying to Kill Us!”

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…olicies of apartheid, points to difficulties of overcoming the legacy of past injustices and disenfranchisement, even as South Africa becomes increasingly globalized. In fact, the accumulation of wealth that accompanies globalization has made the fledgling experiment in multi-racial democracy in South Africa very attractive to other Africans who face civil wars, authoritarian regimes, widespread corruption, and economic turmoil in their home count…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…rt case as inspiring examples of American religious conviction and told guest host Norah O’Donnell that cutting contraception out of insurance policies wasn’t a problem: Is the ability to buy contraceptives, that are now widely available—my Lord, all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them—is that right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffoca…