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Gingrich Downplays Adelson Money, Stokes Fear of “Second Holocaust” at Florida Church

By Sarah Posner

…ughter Bella was hospitalized.) Organizers said they had distributed 1,800 tickets, and the pews in the church were nearly full, with several hundred, if not nearly a thousand people in attendance. Gingrich was the only candidate to appear; Staver, the “forum’s” moderator took pains to point out that they had invited the other candidates. Santorum and Ron Paul had commitments outside of Florida. Mitt Romney, the candidate Staver and other leaders…

Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

By Andrew Aghapour

…tate bribery. We would have to buy new, full-price tickets to Iran. On the phone with JetBlue’s customer service line that night, my righteous fury dissipated quickly. Could JetBlue really be to blame for bad weather, or a mechanical problem, or whatever system error had made our flight impossible? Don’t I benefit regularly from this massive travel infrastructure that, like Lady Justice, doles its punishments out blindly? I accepted $100 in travel…

The Economy is Racism: Ending Race-Based Economic Violence is the Real Challenge of This Moment

By Peter Laarman

…r to receive jobless benefits: all of these too-familiar excrescences flow directly from the unspoken assumption by employers that uncompensated labor remains the ideal in a truly “free” economy. [For this reason it mystifies and infuriates me that none of the lead pieces in the new installment of “The America We Need” in the Times mentions race as the primary driver of this ugly aspect of American exceptionalism. This piece by senior editor Kevin…

Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…Well” card featuring two angels framing an anodyne non-sectarian prayer is directly traceable to the cult of angelic sentimentality so popular in the Victorian Era. Angels populate greeting cards for Christmas and Easter, baptisms and first communions, confirmations and funerals, as well as for health, as in this example. They’re distinctly non-denominational, non-theological, and in a strange way non-religious, a cipher intending to signify happi…

Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

By Daniel Silliman

No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…

‘Anti-Romeo’ Vigilante Squads Target Men Suspected Of Being Gay; More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…married in first month; Lutheran priests barred from officiating More than 800 same-sex couples were married in March after marriage equality went into effect on the first of the month; 770 had already been in civil partnerships. The Lutheran Evangelical Church has decreed that priests are not permitted to marry same-sex couples and some bishops warned that those who do would face “consequences.” From a March 1 story: In spite of the church rulin…

What Makes a Human Bomb Tick?

By Gordon Haber

…which is that “consistent sources are automatically reliable.” The people directly connected to suicide terrorists frequently ascribe ideological motives to their loved one’s act of simultaneous self-destruction and homicide. Friends and family do it, perhaps due to the stigma against suicide. Terrorist leaders make the same claims for propaganda purposes. Even the bombers themselves, in their final videos (another cliché) speak of their delight…

The Sex Scandal Following Whole Foods’ Guru

By Michael Schulson

…ergy. Any kind of community can tolerate behaviors it should not, though a number of New Age leaders, including Deepak Chopra, have moved to distance themselves from Gafni since the Times article came out. Still, that ethic of personal authority and cosmic consciousness remains a significant teaching for many New Age leaders, a teaching that seems especially ill-equipped to address transgression. David Ingber, the rabbi who knew Gafni back when he…

Clergy May Soon Find Taxes Soaring As Result of an Under-the-Radar Ruling

By Patrick Hornbeck

…ate whether providing a tax exemption is identical to subsidizing religion directly, it’s hard to avoid reaching the conclusion that an exemption available only to clergy favors religious employees over secular ones. But like “under God” and “in God we trust,” the special status of clergy in American society has gone unquestioned for many years. If Crabb’s ruling is sustained on appeal, it will substantially impact both ministers and their congreg…

Google’s Benevolent Interfaith Big Tent

By Lucia Hulsether

…light shift—the appeal to the benevolence of the US nation state emerges indirectly, insofar as Google remains a US corporation. More directly, we witness an argument on behalf of corporate power that transcends individual state sovereignty and which uses its global reach to stitch fragmented communities together in a multicultural tapestry. As Google extends its reach, the commercial suggests, it establishes the conditions for cultural unity, as…