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Walt Whitman’s Sacred Democracy

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…f 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 that task continues unabated today. He warned that there was only one thing that rea…

The Women’s March, Anti-Semitism, and ‘The Jewish Farrakhan’

By Shaul Magid

…ed from the community. But this would be an error. Through much of the late 1960s and 1970s, many prominent and mainstream Jews repudiated Kahane’s racism and use of violence, but they nonetheless defended his right to speak and be part of the Jewish conversation. In a 1971 Look Magazine poll, moreover, one in four American Jews polled had a “positive attitude” about the JDL. In the late 1960s there was a push in The Young Israel of Brookline cong…

My Kind of Atheist

By Peter Laarman

…s own contributions to the formation of “movement” Christianity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then he dropped out, turned his back on that kind of power and glory. He produced low-budget movies for a time, wrote some decent autobiographical fiction, and finally returned to writing about the thing he knows best: the damage wrought by hard, doctrinal religion. One senses from this book that Schaeffer is at last free of the need to strap on his…

Vaccine Mandates are Constitutional; Religious Exemptions are Unnecessary and Harmful

By Andrew L. Seidel

…f the pandemic that’s killed 710,000 of our friends, brothers, sisters, and parents—more Americans than all our wars combined—we need to recover that spirit of 1776. Mandatory vaccination now. Religious exemptions be damned….

The Church of Man-Love: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 7

By Mark Dery

…athleen Medwick, Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), pps. 38-39. 12Stephen Prothero, American Jesus, ibid., p. 144. 13Quoted in Prothero, ibid., p. 118. 14 Quoted in Prothero, ibid….

Liberation Theology is Alive and Well

By Mary E. Hunt

…Senator Maria Silva, a collaborator with the late Chico Mendes (murdered in 1988 by ranchers who opposed his efforts to organize rubber tappers), spoke convincingly of the need for sustainable development and the protection of a biodiverse Amazon. She was the first rubber tapper elected to the Brazilian senate, and served as Minister for the Environment from 2003-2008. Hearing her touch on liberation theology provided a ray of hope that what we ar…

When Religion Kills: The Narco-Traffickers of the Borderlands

By Luis Leon

…son, which occasions Christian self examination, control of appetites, and spiritual devotion: sacrifice. KTM emphasizes sacrificing for honor, country, and God, and especially for the state of Michoacan. They require that members exemplify these virtues and many others including humility and, remarkably, religious freedom for those who believe in God. KTM claims to live by a code of ethics that is published in a small illustrated booklet entitled…

Southern Baptist Pres Denounces Gay Bashing in Favor of Eternity in Hell

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ely to their gay and lesbian (and transgender) members and have seen God’s spirit move in, through and around their lives. They have not accepted gay and lesbian people because it’s the path of least resistance, as Mohler implies. Some of those denominations have paid a steep price, losing members and entire congregations because of these decisions. Instead, they have done it because they have felt the Holy Spirit whisper to them that is it is the…

Evangelical Groundhog Day: The ‘Times’ Identifies the ‘Religious Fervor in the American Right’ — Around Four Decades Late

By Diana Butler Bass

…re drawn from even older streams of evangelical politics, especially in the 1920s and 1950s). The specific sort of evangelical politics reported upon is now three generations deep—it is a maturing political-religious movement. To depict it otherwise is to miss the point. Why do conservative evangelicals love Trump, live in an alternate information universe, and believe that a great revival is at hand? They believe it because it is the world they w…

The SBC Sexual Abuse Scandal is a ‘Success’ Story of the Theological Vision and Social Structure of the ‘Conservative Resurgence’

By Diana Butler Bass

…h and Message, a kind of “non-creed” creed. The first version was issued in 1925 during the heyday of the Fundamentalist-Modernist crisis. A 1963 revision toned down the fundamentalism of the older statement, articulating more strongly Baptist latitude in doctrine that favored the liberty of conscience. Eventually, Southern Baptist hardliners—like Patterson and Pressler of Russell Moore’s mythology narrative—would define latitude as liberalism. Th…