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The Collapse of the American Jewish Center

By Sarah Posner

…ents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella organization founded in the 1950s and which claims to speak for a consensus of the American Jewish community. The young Jews outside, though, were challenging that organization’s claim to speak in their name. They read aloud the names of Palestinians and Israelis killed in the latest military escalation between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and they recited the Mourner’s Kaddish. A fe…

Godly Game or Godless Satire? Countering Biblical Ignorance with Heretical Humor

By Betsy Shirley

…Cards Against Humanity, A Game for Good Christians just might be it. Inspired by the R-rated “party game for horrible people” in which players pair cards like “Hospice care,” “An endless stream of diarrhea,” or “A defective condom” with fill-in-the-blank statements like “I got 99 problems but ________ ain’t one,” A Game for Good Christians, released earlier this year, offers a scriptural twist: most of the material from its 300-card deck has been…

India’s Elections and the “Doniger Affair”

By Murali Balaji

…s to escalate—an ongoing battle over religion and the right to define the idea of the state. Religion, a national election, and a nearly 70-year history of bitter political and social grievances seem like ingredients for a cable TV drama (or a Monty Python skit), but instead they came together in an academic-themed drama that got a lot of airtime in both Indian and American media in the past year. The story came to the forefront just before Valent…

My Kind of Atheist

By Peter Laarman

…an Atheist Who Believes in God: How to Give Love, Create Beauty and Find Peace by Frank Schaeffer CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014 Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns. – Wallace Stevens, A High-Toned Old Christian Woman (1922) By now Frank Schaeffer’s critique of crazy right-wing Christianity is suffi…

“Muslim Gospel” Revealing the “Christian Truth” Excites the Da Vinci Code Set

By Annette Yoshiko Reed

…opher John Toland set his eyes upon a remarkable manuscript—what he described in Nazarenus as “a Mahometan [i.e., Muslim] Gospel, never before publicly made known among Christians.” Associated with the apostle Barnabas, the text essentially retold the life of Jesus in terms familiar from the New Testament, but with some major departures. It contended that Jesus denied his divine status; that he had predicted the coming of the prophet Muhammad; and…

In Russia It Is Now a Crime to Insult Someone’s Religious Feelings

By Chrissy Stroop

…my memory of a Facebook status (the quotation may be slightly inexact) posted by a Russian acquaintance at some point in mid-2012: Who will protect my feelings as an atheist? She wrote this in the wake of the Pussy Riot trial. As readers of Religion Dispatches will recall, on August 17, 2012, the trial itself concluded with members of the feminist punk-rock collective sentenced to two years in penal colonies for “hooliganism motivated by religious…

On the Ethics of the Tibetan Self-Immolations

By José Cabezón

Last week the Dalai Lama talked to Australian journalists about the wave of self-immolations by Tibetan protesters: “It’s a sad thing that happens. Of course it’s very very sad. In the meantime, I express I doubt how much effect (there is) from such drastic actions.” The Dalai Lama was speaking here about the human (and political) tragedy inherent in self-immolation, but it was only later in the interview that he remarked—almost as an aside—on th…

Devil’s Bookmark: Atheism for Smarties

By Bernard Schweizer

…gious stances. And yet, because it is so respectful, patient, and level-headed, 36 Arguments may be actually all the more subversive. For one thing, there’s no better way to write a novel about the non-existence of God than to present it in the form of metafiction—fiction that is self-consciously aware of itself. Metafiction says “look, this is only a game, and we’re only pretending that something that doesn’t exist is real, just for the fun of it…

Martin Luther King in the Era of Occupy

By Paul Harvey

On August 28, 1963, King delivered his most famous address, the “Dream” speech. Back in Birmingham a little over two weeks later, King’s dream turned into a nightmare. On the morning of September 15, 1963, a group of nearly thirty black children sat in a basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church, awaiting the closing prayers of a sermon entitled “The Love That Forgives.” Upstairs, adult black congregants gathered for the upcoming service. They h…

Former USCCB Spox: HHS Doesn’t Speak for Me on Contraception

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…doesn’t speak for her, or for many women. The piece links to a website called Women Speak for Themselves. Here’s my question: What would it mean for HHS to “speak for” someone? I’m being entirely sincere, because I think this gets at some thorny questions about what public health recommendations are meant to accomplish in a liberal democracy. The Women Speak for Themselves website elaborates: Those currently invoking “women’s health” in an attempt…