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The Burning Houses of Worship We Missed

…g District of Western China, where officials have reportedly bulldozed over 800 mosques. Authorities have also detained hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in re-education camps. The scale of the suffering is difficult to imagine. In fairness, there’s been a lot of good reporting about the plight of the Uighurs. And yet I believe the outpouring of emotion for more recognizable places—especially Notre Dame—is instructive. Samuel Johnson defined sympat…

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As Florida Attempts to Make it Illegal, an Argument for the Sacred Work of White Discomfort

…f my sixth great uncle and the namesake of my fifth great grandfather, Pleasant Moon, whose 1815 Bible rests on my bookshelf. Inventory of the Goods and Chattles of Pleasant Moon Deceased (1815). From state of Georgia digitized archives. Through the marvels of digital technology, this page moved from a leather bound book in the Twiggs County, Georgia archives, to the printer in my living room. And then it was in my unsteady hands—an accounting led…

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The Fire This Time

…holarship done this summer. Meanwhile, I try to hold it together to write a 800-word piece without crying and wanting to tear my hair out about the pain of my people. I’m not writing prophetic words to you anymore. You fix this shit. I’m done carrying the cross of America, its false promises of democracy and inclusion, the documents that excluded me and called my ancestors three-fifths of a person. You figure it out. I’m about comforting Black peo…

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What Coverage of a Fatal Orthodox Baptism Reveals About Western Media

…mportant marker of Eastern Christian identity—particularly as increasingly numbers of Eastern Christians became the simultaneous targets of Western crusaders and Islamic conquerors. In this context, rigid adherence to liturgical customs became a means by which to assert and preserve identity in the face of colonization and oppression. Conversely, adherence to Christian practices abandoned by the Christian West—if not in the Middle Ages then certai…

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The Radical Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Left’s Challenge Today

…el featuring Bill McKibben, Medea Benjamin, Ash-Lee Henderson, and Corrine Sanchez will discuss the significance of King’s vision for the current moment. King’s speech, given to a packed Riverside Church exactly one year before he was killed in Memphis, is notorious for the way it provoked fury, condemnation and distress at the time. Fury from the Johnson Administration and its pro-war supporters; blistering condemnation in the mainstream media; a…

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My God, David Brooks

…nova effect of choice at every turn, the encomiums, the warnings, the incessant buzz of our almost authentic, almost perfect selves calling us to read (or not to read) Taylor, among other things. All those mundane moments that enable us to better situate ourselves vis-à-vis this thing out there called religion. Taylor does not appreciate the Leviathanism that is the most apt description of the world we are currently living in. This is the secular…

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Welcome to the Shari’ah Conspiracy Theory Industry

…l, as well as a plank in the party’s 2010 platform urging Congress and the Texas legislature to ban shari’ah law, “which is not in accordance with the Constitutions of Texas or of the United States of America.” The Republican Jewish Coalition, which helped distribute Obsession in 2008, has called O’Brien “one of the leading civilian fighters against the Muslim Brotherhood’s global expansion and infiltration in the U.S.” This claim that the Muslim…

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The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Humans

…ill go to Mina, etc. There is still no address for the hotels, but a local phone number. There is also information about processing customs at Jeddah, meeting the tour guide, and information that says “the group” will proceed to Makkah—which means the first will have to wait for the last person, which is the beginning of feeling like you are a group. They even include suggestions to “get to know” your fellow travelers. I still had no idea what wer…

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Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

…s pretty much it. Evangelical leaders themselves didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on convert…

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Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

…pages I’ll confine myself to Religulous.) This is the kind of thing a fair number of my students, raised in the Protestant-dominated United States (even Catholics and Jews have assimilated this definition), come to university thinking about religion; the two key components of which are “belief” and “God.” Religion is some cryptic interior, individual thing that exists in one’s own head, and is only understood in relation to a God. I don’t blame my…

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