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Possible Heir to Dalai Lama Cleared of Corruption Charges

By Tsering Namgyal

…es of the people, for whom they were praying for, for what reason. This seemingly innocuous religious exercise last month snowballed into front-page news after police seized more than a million dollars in cash at the Karmapa’s makeshift headquarters near Dharamsala in North India. The Central Government of India, following weeks of investigation, finally cleared Karmapa of any wrongdoing (the money they found had indeed been an accumulation of don…

Hajj Journal: Tawaf: How I Fell in Love…

By Amina Wadud

…hat the Ka’abah is on and starting that first tawaf, I was stung, as if by mighty bee whose nectar was located inside the cube that seemed at first innocuous. I started smiling and continued to do so whenever I caught sight of the Ka’abah. It became the only thing that mattered, this crude structure established by the Prophet Abraham to commemorate the Oneness and Truth of God. Now, for me, that was all that mattered. Even when a woman to our righ…

Seeking Broad Appeal to US Christians, ‘God & Country: The Rise of Christian Nationalism’ Glosses Over Critical Context

By Chrissy Stroop

…equation of “Christian” with “good” is false and harmful to both religious minorities and the nonreligious. Still, in spite of the filmmakers’ use of the old evangelical “WWJD” fad in promotional materials—thanks for the not-at-all annoying reminder that I wore those cringe cloth bracelets in the 1990s, my dudes—I hoped the film itself would focus less on efforts to “save” Christianity and more on the very real threat to our democracy from authori…

After Orlando: Love Wins, But When?

By Daniel Schultz

…d, come quickly. Fix this mess we have gotten ourselves into. Like any psalmist, I want God’s justice to come down with great might and rubbish the evildoers: the unjust, the oppressors, the violent. But speed isn’t how God operates. The Lord’s omnipotence is often misunderstood on this point. What it means is that there is no force or object strong enough to withstand the strange and patient action of God’s love. Love wins like water, slowly, ach…

With Methodist LGBTQ Vote and GOP Support for Trump, White Protestantism Has Hit Bottom

By Peter Laarman

…he culture of, say, 1960. For example, it’s been 45 years since my own denomination, the United Church of Christ, ordained its first openly gay minister, and there’s no doubt that respect for reason played a major role in its conversion to a gay-positive position. Rejecting reason and common sense, only the American Baptists* and the United Methodists still take the view that committed gay relationships are unacceptable. It is surely no coincidenc…

Dylann Roof Was Wrong: The Race War Isn’t Coming, It’s Here

By Willie James Jennings

…This soothing high does not help. We need to end this war by unmasking whiteness, challenging our religious faith in competition, and dealing with the long painful history of white (especially male) frustration in a system which awards a very limited number of medals for achieving whiteness. We are all afraid of the copycats—unstable people who may, in the weeks and months ahead, follow Roof’s murderous pattern. But the pattern is already in place…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…vulnerable population further into the shadows. Because many families have mixed immigrant statuses (some members are undocumented, some legal residents, and some U.S.-born citizens), sole reliance on enforcement often ends up hurting fellow citizens, as when the parents or siblings of the estimated three million children of undocumented immigrants born in this country are deported. There is, however, a deeper problem with the framing of the issue…

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…s tend to hold filmmakers to different standards than they hold their academic peers, and they are much too dismissive of the former. While we may be reluctant to admit it, we all simplify complexity, we all reduce our narratives to a few clear points, we all use evidence selectively, we all repackage our original sources, and we all attempt to craft engaging narratives. In sum, those of us sitting comfortably in our cheap desk chairs in our steri…

Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…ed that she had a disabled son. Here and there, Penance hurts. Between the cheap jokes and bourgeois self-loathing are murmurs worth hearing, if only as microfiction. Likewise, the app’s agnosticism facilitates a lucid tableau of spontaneous popular theology. Of the 24 confessions, only one references God as an active third party, two command the Sinner to forgive themselves, and three confessors speak in the first person as God. “God forgive me,”…

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

By Peter Laarman

…t Mr. Pecksniff had (as things go) good argument for what he had said, and might be permitted to say it, and did not say it presumptuously, vainly, or arrogantly, but in a spirit of high faith and great wisdom. The naked opportunist who, at the same time, imagines himself to be in the service of the Lord. Almost always a white man. How many of this cast and type has the rest of humanity had to endure for the past few hundred years? Senator Ted Cru…