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Year-End Best Books in Race and Religion in American History

…tion here. Clark’s work comes from the archives of the Afro-Creole Spiritualist group Cercle Harmonique from 1858 to 1877. By focusing on Afro-Creole Spiritualism in New Orleans, we get an extended, as well as intimate, look at how one very particular group, mostly men and free people of color, envisioned their ideal society through the voices of spirit mediums. In doing so, they drew from French thinkers and historical experiences (including ever…

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Trump’s “Muslim Ban” A Gift to Terrorists

…tates, nor have there been any Iranian or Iraqi terrorists. Donald Trump’s list of banned nations is comprised of nothing more than the most vulnerable of Muslim countries, six of whom we’ve bombed or used in proxy wars. Like all bullies, he has found a soft and weak target to point his finger at. Some may take heart that his order only focuses on a small number of countries, but if his authoritarian tendencies remain consistent, then we should kn…

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Bipolar Faith, an Autobiography of Race and Mental Illness

…r of the book. When the publishers presented the idea to me, I gave them a list of all the memoirs without the author’s face on the cover. They gave me a comparable list of memoirs that have the author’s face on the cover. Between the Atlanta-based photographer Anne Simone and cover designer Brad Norr, I felt confident that they could put together something appropriate and poignant. The photo on the cover was caught between posed pictures when I g…

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Walt Whitman’s Sacred Democracy

…en rough contemporaries like Toni Morrison and Cornel West, to this august list of American spiritualists-in-letters—was ultimately a psalmist of the human spirit. He was, as we would now say, “spiritual (or sacred), not religious.” But then, in his judgment, that’s what democracy is all about. The very coin of the democratic realm is “sacred.”  Whitman saw the work of fostering such a “religious democracy” as the work of the 20th century, and tha…

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3 Reasons Catholic Bishops Are Holding Their Tongues on GOP Health Care Debacle

…raceptive mandate for any reason, which has long been on the bishops’ wish list, but have a history of attacking contraception in general. Katy Talento, who is now a White House domestic policy aide, has warned of the (false) health risks of oral and other hormonal contraceptives, charging that they are carcinogens, ruin women’s fertility and cause miscarriages. And, like the bishops, she suggests that natural family planning, which has the highes…

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Putting the “Protest” Back in Protestant: Reclaiming the Spirit of Resistance

…Tarbell, Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, Eleanor Roosevelt—it’s a very long list of reformers and independent thinkers. These are all WASPy names, as you may have noticed. I now want to add that in the American context, some of the greatest “Protestants” (in terms of freedom and spirit) have been anything but WASPy: I am thinking here of Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter and Benjamin Cardozo. And of Peter Zenger and Carl Schurz and John Peter Al…

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Evangelical Stephen Baldwin’s Imitatio Christi & “Reality” TV

Over the last year or two, I’ve become an unironic, unapologetic fan of reality TV. I know the criticisms—they dumb us down, they elevate public humiliation—but what I’m really interested in is the way shows like Spike’s Joe Schmo Show or VH1’s I Love Money turn into morality plays about the value of friendship and loyalty. In the best reality shows, the initial rush of schadenfreude is gradually replaced with a genuine affection for the “good gu…

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What’s Behind a Conservative Mormon’s Call For “Religious Freedom” Advocates to “Stand Down” on LGBT Rights

…poraries call “natural law,” loosely defined as a universal and unchanging code determined by God. “My conception of freedom is a moral ecology of things,” Mero says. “It’s not just liberty to do what you want to do as long as you don’t hurt somebody else… I believe freedom requires virtue. We have to be our better selves. And if we are not our better selves, then we are going to lose the free society.” But what does being one’s better self look l…

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Catholic Anti-Nuke Activists Looking at 20 Years in Prison a True Test for Religious Freedom

…ons, such as a Sikh who successfully sued the Army in 2015 over a grooming code that would have required him to shave his beard and remove his turban. Justice, not to mention old wisdom about geese and ganders, demands that our judicial system should treat like cases alike. Either sincere religious conviction should be a defense, or it shouldn’t. There should be a healthy debate about the place and extent of religious exemption in contemporary, pl…

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‘Putin’s Children’ Push ‘Traditional Values’ in Latvia; Jewish Reparative Therapy Group Finds ‘Haven’ In Israel; Sikh Activist in UK Supports LGBT South Asians; Global LGBT Recap

…ses a set of principles for American activists working in other countries: listen to and be guided by people on the ground; recognize that civil society groups in other countries may also spurn LGBT work; be flexible; acknowledge that the U.S. has also committed human rights abuses; don’t be silenced by repressive propaganda framing LGBT human rights as a Western import; and take the long view. Latvia: ‘Putin’s Children’ – A Look at the ‘Moral Gua…

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