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Gambian President Threatens to Kill Asylum Seekers

By Peter Montgomery

…l, Crown Prince of Rajpipla, India, was profiled this week in Frontiers, a Los Angeles-based publication. Manvendra was born and raised to assume the custodianship of the crown, with all the discipline, expectations and circumspection his catered life allowed. He was always surrounded by servants, so protected that he didn’t even cross the street alone until he was 16. “Quite a nightmare,” he says, especially on Indian roads. Like many LGBT people…

RD News Round-Up—Nov. 4, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…Right organizations took in more than half a billion dollars over a recent 12-month period.” In the October issue of Americans United’s Church & State magazine, Rob Boston reported that: “several of the organizations showed dramatic increases in their budgets; only a few showed a drop.” Boston’s piece, titled “The Religious Right Top Ten: Right-Wing Religious Forces Have Money, Influence And Power—And They’re Seeking More,” provides useful profil…

A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…ack where we belong: in the season of spending. While not reviving the post-September 11 rhetoric of shopping as an act of nationalism, we are once again being encouraged to spend—and told that spending is good for us. While disagreeing with this particular logic, I do agree that shopping is an ethical act. Today we live in a culture of cheap. We have an unprecedented access to cheap goods, yet we must recognize that cheap goods are cheaply made….

A Muslim Reflects on Christian Theologian (and UCLA Coach) John Wooden

By Amir Hussain

…lim role models. One of them was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Coach Wooden’s 7-foot-2-inch center at UCLA. In learning more about Kareem (born Lew Alcindor), I came to appreciate the influence that Coach Wooden had had on him during the racially and politically charged period of the late 1960s. I wrote to Coach Wooden as an undergraduate asking for a copy of his famous Pyramid of Success. About a month later I received an autographed copy, along with a ni…

Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…n the potential for God to radically change a person’s life. The once-I-was-lost-but-now-I’m-found narrative in Pentecostalism really resonates with inmates. That’s when I decided to focus my research on Pentecostalism, not just religion inside prison. Once you had that preparation under your belt, how did you come to choose the prison in Rio de Janeiro for your work? I found the prison through Rio de Paz, a human right group led by a local pastor…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…even to the point of fallacy. At one point Langdon is rescued by an African-American man who is a thirty-third degree Mason of the Scottish Rite and a lodge brother of Peter Solomon, which is highly unlikely. American Freemasonry, including the Scottish Rite, has always been unofficially segregated. In the 1780s, Prince Hall, a black Bostonian, was initiated by some Irish soldiers. The white lodges in Boston refused to accept him, so he formed his…

Hajj Journal: The Journey Begins and Ends

By Amina Wadud

…Think about this—after all the excitement to get started with this once-in-a-lifetime journey, to stop again in the U.S. is the worst kind of interim re-routing. I mean, am I on my way? Are we there yet? But the Charles de Gaulle airport, which is the transit spot to Jeddah—now that is really something. First of all, there will be other pilgrims there and the ihram has to be taken up, either here at the airport or on the plane itself. When we lea…

How Much Did Jesus Care About Sex?

By Peter Laarman

…arrest. Segue to my second and primary point: Bonhoeffer’s discussion of cheap grace in The Cost of Discipleship was meant above all as a critique of the so-called “German Christians”—the Lutherans who readily went along with the Nazi program—as against the much smaller group of Lutherans who chose the path of resistance through their Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer recognized that the Lutheran emphasis on salvation by grace alone had always been…

Republican Scandals Drag Secretive ‘Family’ Into the Big Time

By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston

…threat that The Family poses won’t sink in. So—how do we interrupt business-as-usual and provide an alternative to the reigning narrative? JS: The single most valuable point made in Empire, the paradigm-shifting argument by political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is that the days of what might be called hard empire—enforced occupation armies and viceroys and gunboats—have given way to a form of soft empire that “presents itself not as…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…r all its ecstasies and disappointments, it is a journey to faith that began with the loss of it. [We are grateful to the author, editors, and publishers of All-American: 45 American Men on Being Muslim for permission to reprint this excerpt. —The Eds.]…