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ABC’s Hit Sitcom Black-ish Does God, Pushes Theological Respectability

…e episode is marked by affirmation of problematic assumptions limiting the number of those who qualify as “black” by restricting what constitutes an acceptable relationship to dominant religious claims. For example, Dre wrestles with the origins of his daughter’s turn away from God, and concludes, based on a survey of his co-workers, that whites don’t believe and African Americans do. The implication is sure: belief in God is part of the cultural…

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After Orlando: Love Wins, But When?

…ut the same law that buys a venison steak in the Great Northwoods brings a cheap Taurus pistol to Baltimore, to people who also feel unheard and neglected. (Never mind the strange psychology of the “lone wolf.”) So the freedom to live without threat and the freedom to own a gun are at odds. Someone will have to win and someone will have to lose. I mean this quite literally. The only way to have meaningful gun control will be to vote people out of…

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The Problem with Christian Gentlemen: A Short Goodbye to Ted Cruz, the “Mr. Pecksniff” of Presidential Politics

…d self-congratulation. Dickens makes the most of Pecksniff by giving him a number of interior monologues, as here when Pecksniff is rationalizing his decision to pimp out his younger daughter at a rather cheap dowry price to a rich but grotesquely uncouth suitor: All his life long he had been walking up and down the narrow ways and by-places, with a hook in one hand and a crook in the other, scraping all sorts of valuable odds and ends into his po…

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There’s No Business Like the Bible Business: 200 Years of the ABS

…cts, images of a white dude who is supposed to be Jesus, and so on and on. Numbers appear through this book, sometimes with numbing frequency and volume. Thousands of Bibles in the early years of the ABS; tens of thousands some decades later; millions and millions through the course of the twentieth century. The numbers document the stunning capacity of the ABS to flood the zone with Scriptures. Through the book, the ABS accomplished exactly that…

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An Open Letter to Black Clergy on the Disdain for Protest

…y or by a wannabe Martin Luther King. While the President sermonized about cheap grace, a daughter of the church climbed a flagpole and took down the American swastika. Like Mary and Elizabeth, Bree Newsome proclaimed that our salvation—wrapped in swaddling clothes—is here in our hands. As an ordained clergyperson nurtured in the bosom of the black church, I am all too familiar with the way in which we tend to spiritualize the material suffering o…

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Despising the Holidays: When Christians Led the ‘War on Christmas’

…became the equivalent of a blockbuster. In the chaos of the era print was cheap and plentiful, and the collapse of the licensing laws insured a degree of free speech hitherto unknown in the British Isles. The World Turned Upside Down would prove so enduring that it has been an English folk ballad for more than 350 years. The song’s opening verse, “Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d. /Old Christmas is kicked out of Town” remains per…

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The Moral Bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Asceticism

…is unethical, I wonder how he imagines those clothes in China are made so cheaply, and whether an industrial factory qualifies as a gauntlet. If Rhinehart washed his clothes himself, however, he would need a washing machine, which takes energy, and he couldn’t say he lived on a battery anymore. A commenter on Rhinehart’s post aptly called this brand of asceticism “consumption laundering”; because Rinehart doesn’t do the consumption himself, it do…

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Springtime for Ross Douthat?

…y now), Gustavo Gutierrez, Marcus Borg, James Cone, Sallie McFague, or any number of other thinkers and theologians that Douthat does not recognize. The only people who want to bring back Niebuhr are conservatives. (I’m an admitted fanboy, but that’s about coming from the same church background as Niebuhr as much as anything.) And that doesn’t even get to the worst of it. Douthat misunderstands Francis’ amazing, charismatic realignment of Catholic…

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SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

…dless of their…profession,” but I somehow doubt that sanitation workers outnumber investment bankers in SoulCycle studios (one of which is across the street from the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Tribeca). Classes with popular instructors sell out in minutes, and patrons can pay upwards of $70 per class in order to get priority booking. “Ultimately, this is what brand religion is all about: stoking emotion with a combination of scarcity and urgenc…

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On the 40th Anniversary of Hyde, A Theological Defense of Reproductive Justice

…he same Bible out of which my conservative brothers and sisters pull these cheap one-liners to control the conversation about reproductive health also shows us the life and ministry of Jesus—whom we all claim to follow. The Jesus of the Gospel always treated poor people and people in crisis with compassion, never judgement. I don’t understand how you can claim to model yourself on Jesus while seeking to constantly judge and shame and limit people….

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