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The Right’s ‘Grooming’ Rhetoric Didn’t Begin with QAnon — You Have to Go Back a Bit Further to Get to the Source

By Sophie Bjork-James

…riarchal leaders. In all of my research on evangelical culture in Colorado Springs, including sitting through dozens of sermons, Bible study conversations, and conducting around one hundred interviews, I rarely heard anyone mention the existence or possibility of sexual abuse taking place within the church. The current focus on LGBT “grooming” portrays threats to children as stemming from an imagined other, outside of conservative and evangelical…

Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

…ager for attention. The puppy piddled in the corner more than once, taking cheap shots at political adversaries (including McCain campaign apparatchiks) and using the annoying, sophomoric reference to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat” Party. But Going Rogue was not unpleasant. The second book in the Sarah Palin œuvre, however, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, crosses the line from cute puppy bouncing on his back legs…

‘We’re all in this together’: The Perils of Kumbaya Rhetoric

By Peter Laarman

Talk is cheap, and sentimental talk cheapens public discourse in dangerous ways at a time when total sobriety is required. Eight weeks into a public health and economic catastrophe, the facts before us should be sobering enough: Disease and death in this pandemic overwhelmingly afflict communities of color (e.g. despite making up just a third of the state’s population, 70% of the dead in Louisiana have been African American; in Michigan the numbe…

Hajj Journal: Tawaf: How I Fell in Love…

By Amina Wadud

…upposed to face the Ka’abah and hold both hands as high as your ears, with palms toward the black stone, and recite “bismi-Lah, Allahu Akbar laa ilaha illa-Allah.” Then raise your right hand as if in greeting and bring it back to kiss. If you are close enough to the stone, you’re supposed to kiss it. If you cannot kiss it, you should touch it with the right hand; if not, then just wave and kiss the hand. People also will touch it with an item of c…

Note for Today

By Amina Wadud

…ps, dresses, and scarves. I feel like I need one more scarf. Not for sheer number, but for style; there are so many styles, and one has to decide what works best individually. I have my long prayer scarves that do not need any pins to be neatly kept in place. But they are really long, and I wish I had at least one as neat, but shorter. I want to be hands-free and secure at the same time. I have long rectangular shapes that get draped, and I will u…

Evangelicals Clutching Pearls Over Student Debt Relief: Lord Have Mercy!

By Peter Laarman

…structure of public life, as policymakers traded easy credit and access to cheap consumer goods for high wages and a measure of economic security. It is no coincidence that all of this took shape in the wake of the civil rights movement, the fracturing of the New Deal coalition and the end (for those who had enjoyed it) of the Fordist economic order of male breadwinners and traditional families. Opposition to broad redistribution on the basis of r…

In Hamline Case, the ‘Free Expression vs. Religious Sensibilities’ Frame Obscures a Stark Reality About Higher Education

By Junaid Jahangir

…nging rainbow flags to promote Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) is a cheap tactic if LGBTQ employees are treated poorly when it comes to pay, benefits, leave, promotion, and job security. Divide-and-rule is not a new tactic, for it’s well known in the Indian subcontinent that the British pitted one local Raja against the other based on tribe, religion, or caste—among other factors. The same applies to corporations as they stoke divisiveness…

Romney Goes to Bat Against Reid in Nevada

By Joanna Brooks

…ast two decades, more than 1.4 million people moved to Nevada in search of cheap housing and boom-time fueled hospitality, tourism, and construction jobs, more than doubling the state’s population. Now, those speculation-and-spending fueled good times are gone. That volatility does not treat mild-mannered Mormon politicians well: be they Reids, or Romneys. Just last week, Jan Shipps, a longtime scholar and canny observer of Mormon experience, wage…

Can a Greek Monastery Be Ground Zero of Global Financial Meltdown?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…priesthood; fewer still felt attracted to the grueling life on an isolated northern peninsula. The Russian monastery was closed, as the Soviet regime had made it impossible to supply the place with monks. The libraries were entirely unused; staffed in most cases by a single monk, all they could do was to keep the place clean and dry; no librarian had any sense of what these libraries contained. Father Ephraim and some other enterprising young mon…

70th National Prayer Breakfast Made ‘Cosmetic’ Changes, But Biden Delivered the Same Old Tone-Deaf ‘Unity’ Message

By Chrissy Stroop

…, more humane, more united country; I certainly would. But there can be no cheap or easy unity in a country torn apart by an increasingly fascist Right. Troublingly, establishment Democrats like Biden seem unwilling to hear that comity with unreconstructed bigots will only legitimize and empower them in their authoritarian lust for power, causing severe harm to—to use a biblical turn of phrase—“the least of these.” If you want a united populace, y…