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Election Day: Hope, Heartbreak, Naiveté, and Studs Terkel

By The Editors

…year as never before. Today Americans are voting. May all be guided by the spirit of love and wisdom in our choices. And when the polls close, may the spirit of love and wisdom continue to prevail in our reactions to the outcome—no matter who wins. In elections there are winners and losers, but we all lose if the winners fail to reach out to their fellow citizens who voted in the minority. May we move forward together. In your many names we pray….

Jesus Has Left the Building: Celebrating the Next Reformation

By Donna Schaper

…eran or Presbyterian was. Now most people who still believe with a gracing Spirit don’t really care what they are in the first place. That applies unless you are the type of conservative Christian who has a theology of blame and shame or what I call “punishmentalism.” Then you still want to “get it right.” The mainlines are the old lines, and the evangelicals’ dogmatism will soon be there as well. Gratia always escapes religious tendrils and chain…

A Writer’s Murder Raises Fears of Death-by-Decree

By Shalom Goldman

…ording to Kadivar, not based on authoritative Shia sources, but, rather, on 19th-century texts. In Kadivar’s opinion, Shia jurisprudence might support a fully democratic system of government. This book, published in 1999, led to Kadivar’s imprisonment for “spreading false information about the Islamic Republic and helping the enemies of the Islamic Revolution.” Kadivar was sentenced to 18 months in prison and served his sentence in Tehran’s notori…

Resisting the “New Normal” of Parasitic Capitalism in the Two Americas: The Religious Imperative

By Peter Laarman

…this prophetic mold. Let me end this by saying that I am not holding my breath. I do not expect a radical religious voice to suddenly emerge in this way. The signs of near-complete religious domestication are everywhere. Yet I also believe that the Holy Spirit can descend at even the most unexpected times. And if even a small fraction of US religious leaders were to catch this particular spirit, I have no doubt that all kinds of holy hell would b…

Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

By Kathryn Joyce

…ntial property, although it has been in use as a medical facility since the 1950s, collecting 14,000 petition signatures to push for a city planning commission hearing. Their argument, ironically, was that the disruption anti-abortion protesters would bring—coming to the neighborhood in groups as large as 500 for some regular events, with smaller protests around the clock—would constitute a nuisance and safety concern. “We told the city that if th…

AR-15 Lapel Pins are More Than Political Provocation — They’re Symbols of the Violence at the Heart of White Christian Nationalism

By Annika Brockschmidt

…nity” originated as a youth movement. The core principle was that a strong spirit required a strong body as well—a principle that made its way to the US and was fused with the frontier spirit and Manifest Destiny, as historian Peter Manseau explains: “All of this might seem far removed from holiday cards, until one recalls that it is Jesus himself who has been proposed as the exemplar of the ‘manly and virile’ faith found at the root of Christmas…

What This All-Star Christian Movie Gets Wrong About Christianity

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…that he was so moved by it, so shaken, that it can only have been the Holy Spirit. I don’t think I overstate things when I suggest that the screenwriters mean for us to interpret their movie by the same rubric. The movie moves us… or, well, it moves the people it was intended for. Aha, that must be the Holy Spirit at work! Theologically, though, such a rubric is entirely wrongheaded. If my mind should generate some pious-sounding blurt, and if I s…

New Book by Olivier Roy Argues that Aggressive Attempts to Christianize the West Actually Hasten Secularism

By Ivan Strenski

…n Switzerland has further secularized Christianity in that country. In the spirit of religious tolerance, the Swiss don’t object to the building of mosques as such, but only to the foreign-ness of them; to the fact that they don’t fit into Switzerland’s Christian character. Thus, building ‘Swiss-looking’ mosques (cuckoo-clock tower minarets?) would be fine because they’d conform to Swiss aesthetics ―even though, ironically, promoting Islam in the…

Why Go to Church If You Don’t Believe Anymore?

By Angela Bonavoglia

…fe? Who would design this? In the end, Jesus resigns himself, commends his spirit to God in faith. Was his faith rewarded? Will ours be? I want to know: how did Jesus really feel when it was over? Was it all worth it? Did he come to life again, not in body (that belief is fast becoming myth even in Christian circles) but in spirit? Will we? The service finished, I head out of that beautiful garden at the back of the church toward the street, in th…

The Economy is Sacred, Stupid

By Gary Laderman

…treatment, save for classics like Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and more recent sociological studies like Robert Wuthnow’s God and Mammon in America. A few questions may help make the case about the intimate, if unexpressed, links between money and religion: Is the pursuit of wealth an ultimate value? Is self-worth tied to the accumulation of material goods? How do moral virtues connect to marketplace success? Is mo…