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The Rise and Fall of an American Gang: Religion as Camouflage?

By Spencer Dew

…Originally the El Rukns were affiliated—at least in name—with the Moorish Science Temple of America, one of the multiple organizations to emerge from the fracture of Moorish Science after the death of the religion’s founder, Noble Drew Ali, who died in Chicago in 1929. Ali presented himself as a prophet of Allah, advancing a vision of religious nationalism in which black Americans were called to recognize their true heritage as “Moors” and theref…

Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

By Rachel Wagner

…es” has committed an “Expression of Regret” offense. Some are less worried about the corrupting influence of new media at large than they are about the unsavory mixing of sacred digitized files with more plebian or even offensive digital files. For example, how should a Muslim treat an iPod once he or she has downloaded the entire Qur’an onto it? Is there a difference between downloading the Qur’an onto an iPod intended solely for worship purposes…

White Supremacy, Mental Illness, or Society: What’s to Blame for Religious Violence?

By Michael Schulson

…at all? As is so often the case, the act of assigning blame tells us more about the blamer than it does about society. Where evidence is absent, preconceptions—or, to use a less euphemistic term, prejudices—have room to roam. As a small library of commentary has documented, Western observers are often quicker to blame Islam for an attack by a self-professed Muslim than they are to blame Christianity for a similar attack by a self-professed Christ…

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

By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

…tional, irrational, and politically disengaged. And this still says little about the ways in which racial and religious identity are conflated in so many conversations about African-American religion. So perhaps it might be helpful to consider, paraphrasing Stuart Hall circa 1991, what exactly this “black” and “Christian” is in post-black church debates. Following Glaude’s phrase, I’ll touch upon “the black” first. We can rightfully locate his ana…

Capricology: Week 2: The Soul of a Robot

By Salman Hameed

…assaying forms of humanness. Was Tony Soprano human? Well maybe, but what about Al Swearengen? Okay, him too, but what about Dexter? Hmm—if he’s inside the tent, what about something that isn’t even a someone? We’ve seen humanoid Cylons, slinky terminators, and programmed “dolls” save our (“real”) butts more than once. Yet we’re ready to debate it all again as we watch a life form shapeshift (within its own consciousness and to our omnipotent gaz…

Australia’s Harsh Refugee Policies Stirring Backlash; Malawi Court Sides With Pastors To Lift Moratorium on Sodomy Prosecutions; Uzbek President Says God Has Taken Gays’ Reason Away; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…re LGBT groups are virtually banished from the public space… it is all but science fiction to speak about gay marriage and request the constitutional court to weigh in on it,” said Lasha Kavtaradze, spokesperson for the Human Rights Education and Monitoring Centre. The Guardian notes that the European Union has tried to prevent LGBT rights from becoming an obstacle to closer tied with Georgia: In Georgia, attitudes towards sexual orientation are l…

New York Times Columnist Peter Steinfels’ Letter To RD; With Author Response

By Mark D. Jordan

…or anyone who has followed us this far. A prefatory note: My piece was not about Mr. Steinfels, much less about the whole of his remarkable career. Really, he was not at center stage—certainly not as the “whipping boy, from beginning to end.” He allows that I am a scholar, so perhaps he’ll concede that I wouldn’t attempt a bio-bibliographical conspectus of a prolific writer in a thousand words. (I’ve been known to take five thousand to explicate t…

Comparing Gender Transition and Surrogacy to War and Human Trafficking, Vatican’s ‘Dignitas Infinita’ is an Intellectually Embarrassing and Harmful Mess

By Mary E. Hunt

…aters over your head? It only makes the reader wonder what they don’t know about science and money. Such advice, if it had been heeded by these writers, would have avoided unnecessary and unhelpful confusion, injury, and scandal that have characterized the document’s reception—or in many cases, non-reception. Canon lawyer James A. Coriden’s explanation of “The Canonical Doctrine of Reception” comes to mind. This document is a perfect example of te…

The Queerness of Christian Ethics: A Conversation with Rev. Elizabeth Edman

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…lines between life and death. Then you’ve got these extraordinary stories about Jesus where he’s reaching out to people in a healing narrative. When Jesus talks with people about who a neighbor is, he is calling his followers to queer their conceptions of self and other. He told stories that flipped roles around, to get people to perceive that they weren’t in opposition to one another. In The Letter to the Galatians, Paul calls on people to dispe…

Ian Buruma on the Political Excesses of Religion

By Lisa Webster

…e more zealous populists who have an overtly anti-Islam agenda, don’t talk about Christianity—they talk about the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment used to be associated with the left, with liberals. But now, suddenly, defenders of the Enlightenment argue that the West stands for Enlightenment values and Muslims—religious Muslims—are challenging it, attacking it, undermining. But my view is that they’re using the Enlightenment as a kind of badg…