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Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…ublic discourse. This accounts for the powerful role churches played for African Americans during the civil rights movement. Since the issue of immigration ultimately has to do with how inclusive America can and should be, churches must be a part of the conversation. Moreover, one of the first things that immigrants do as they settle in the United States is to look for places where they can practice their religions collectively. Often they come to…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: “They Came at Night, Trying to Kill Us!”

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…o think that anti-immigrant violence of the scale recently seen in South Africa is not possible in America. However, the widespread violence perpetrated at the end of the 19th century against Chinese immigrants as reaction to the “yellow peril” and the Zoot Suit riots in the early 1940s give us plenty of reasons not to be overly complacent. Cases of anti-immigrant violence in South Africa and the US also show that, while the effects of undocumente…

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,”…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…rd, all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them—is that right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffocate the rights of conscience?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by h…

Hajj Journal: Tawaf: How I Fell in Love…

By Amina Wadud

…getting ever more taut. Soon, she just disappeared. At another point, an African guy circled close enough to me from behind that his elbow stayed square in my back for more than one of the sides; and so, I told him, in English too, “remove your elbow from my back,” and he did, and then he too disappeared. At the 6th round, I was certain that we would not get close enough to touch the black stone, touch the Ka’abah, kiss the black stone, or even se…

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…en the academy and the public has dramatically grown. At the same time, Americans’ faith in (and their tax dollars contributed toward) American higher education has dramatically shrunk. Scholars are simply not doing a good enough job of making their research accessible and relevant to the public. Meanwhile, we have successfully mastered the art of boring people. PBS (especially its American Experience series) has stepped into the academy-public ga…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…rd, all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them—is that right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffocate the rights of conscience?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by…

National Association of Evangelicals Supports Immigration Reform, But Elsewhere Discord Reigns

By Donna Schaper

…risis. There is a human reality right in front of our noses. There are thousands of children of undocmented immigrants who don’t sleep at night because they are afraid of losing their father or mother; other thousands have already lost their father or mother. Someday heroic books will be written about them. Right now, they are hurting and hurting, at a developmental moment which keeps on hurting them. They are children. Jesus had a way of being pr…

‘People You May Know’ Reveals a War on Democracy Being Waged With Big Data

By Chrissy Stroop

…ou emphasized that in the film, because I think it’s a really important American reality that many Europeans probably don’t grasp. Just, the extent to which it’s difficult for those who aren’t religious to get themselves plugged into a socially supportive community, which you need all the more because we hardly have a social safety net in America. KGV: Absolutely. Down here in Alabama, church daycare is the thing to do. CS: And of course there’s a…

Israel’s Immigration Debate: “Where is the Jewish Spirit?”

By Mati Wagner

…350,000 non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and tens of thousands of Falash Mura, descendents of Jews who converted to Christianity. Some 130,000 Palestinians have received Israeli citizenship under family reunion arrangements. Finally, an estimated 25,000 Africans from Sudan, Eritrea, and other countries have infiltrated the country via Egypt. Together with Arab Israelis, approximately 30% of the population (inside the Green Line)…