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The Landmark 85-Year-Old Report Absent From Debates Over Missionary’s Death

By Amy Fallas

…ve” justifies the means. As a scholar of missionary history, I’ve seen how American missionaries have assisted those in need. During World War I, American missionaries across the Middle East were key protagonists in forming the Near East Relief, which administered aid to millions displaced by war and conflict. Into the mid-twentieth century, missionaries and faith-based organizations were at the forefront of addressing global refugee crises follow…

What Passover Taught Me About Being Black

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…the urban centers of America, favelas of Brazil, shanties of Jamaica, and reservations of the American West. For years, I would anticipate the arrival of spring and Passover season. Meticulously cleaning my house of leaven as I awaited this celebration of freedom. Now when I watched The Ten Commandments I was once again rooting for Moses (albeit a white one) and the Hebrews as they dueled with Ramses and the Egyptians. But then something unexpect…

Ebola and Us: The American Roots of Liberia’s Trauma

By Peter Laarman

…er polite and academic. The ACS types took up mob violence against African American schools and churches and raided antislavery institutions. In Connecticut they blocked the opening of a black college (the first of its kind) in New Haven, and they persecuted Prudence Crandall’s school for African American girls and women in Canterbury, putting Crandall on trial and physically destroying her school. The Colonization Society’s official name was “The…

Making Fun of Mormonism

By Max Mueller

…be at the Values Voters Summit, the recent Pew Forum survey found that the number one word Americans associate with Mormonism is “cult.” The caricaturing of Mormon weirdness, even by public thinkers who should know better, does have consequences. Yet Mormon scholars like Bringhurst believe that this is a natural, and even welcome, vetting process of both Mormons as American and a Mormon as the chief American. (In this vetting process, one belief t…

Atheist Monument: Proof of Unintelligent Design

By Gordon Haber

…a successful monument makes it hard to imagine its setting without it. The American Atheists monument fails on both counts. When granted the opportunity to memorialize atheism in a public place, American Atheists decided to install a bench. In one sense, this is a clever idea, in that it reflects the utilitarian impulse of American atheism. But a bench is also something that you put your butt on. And this particular bench is an eyesore. About five…

Gay-Hating Church Burns “Idols”: A Report

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…ued that acts such as the burning of the Qur’an, while legal, provoke anti-American sentiment and endanger American troops, Westboro’s Tim Phelps argues that it’s the invasion of Muslim nations and the killing of countless civilians that has inspired violence by Muslims. The media, he says, ignores these civilian deaths, “as if their lives did not matter at all,” instead calling down wrath on religious believers exercising their rights to free spe…

Sacred&Profane: American Martyrdom

By Gary Laderman

…, the most openly religious American President of all time has inflicted the worst kinds of sacrilege on the body politic, and utterly underestimated the spiritual demands of growing numbers of Americans who are beginning to question his authority to shape how we remember the individual bodies who died under his command….

A Head Full of Monsters: American History as Horror Show

By W. Scott Poole

…ructions that take place at the intersection of religion, politics and the American way of violence. The America that has sold, lynched and bombed human beings has had a head full of monsters. So let’s be done with the language of symbolism. It’s weak tea. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? Two audiences. Educated readers of history interested in exploring the darkest parts of the American forest. Second, horror fans like myse…

American Infidel: Robert Ingersoll Was the “Great Agnostic” of the (Last) Gilded Age

By Peter Laarman

…ink of humans as the crown of creation (they rattled Darwin’s own nerves), Americans in Ingersoll’s time were on the whole less anti-scientific than those of our own time, when just under half of adult Americans tell pollsters they do not accept evolutionary theory. Ingersoll was brilliantly able to allay lingering anxieties about the indignity of human kinship with other species. In his lectures he deftly showed that the idea of an ascending huma…

Conservatives, Messianic Jews, and the Jews

By Sarah Posner

…sh’s appearance. But he also argued that the recent landmark Pew survey of American Jews “suggests that the real problem the American Jewish community faces is the voluntary departure of Jews from Judaism. As Jonathan Tobin recently wrote in Commentary, the key takeaway from the Pew study is the degree to which American Jews are choosing not to live as Jews. The departure of Jews from Judaism via forced conversion pales before the voluntary abando…