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Finding Love—and Dogma—in Unexpected Places: Jeff Chu’s Gay Christian Odyssey

…rable, messy selves? The church is where you dress up and wear your Sunday best. That sometimes precludes being real. Did you find any of your expectations easily confirmed? What surprised me the least is how dogmatic people can be on all points of the theological spectrum. It was disappointing, but it wasn’t surprising, to hear Fred Phelps be dogmatic. It was disappointing but not surprising to hear people in the Metropolitan Community Church be…

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The Mystic in the Rye: JD Salinger’s Religious Fiction

…at you must be longing to hear now. That is, if as I know you do, you love best in this world those little beings of pure spirit with a natural temperature of 125, then it naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person—the God-knower or God-hater (almost never apparently anything in between), the saint or profligate, moralist or complete immoralist—who can write a poem that is a poem. Among human beings, he’s the curlew sandp…

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The Mother of Christian Feminist Ethics, Beverly Wildung Harrison: 1932–2012

…cs.” Eventually her students helped her collect these essays in one of the best books ever published in feminist religious thought, Making the Connections. Many chapters from these books warrant book-length treatment, but she published just one such monograph: Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion. Although Bev’s interests ranged widely, this book is a good example of how she taught her students to frame issues—to think concretely ab…

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From Organized Religion to Organizing Religion: Brian D. McLaren Wants Christians to Be Better

…e end, is up to us in creatively seizing opportunities. I’ll keep doing my best to do so, in the company of many others. Of course I think your theological section is exactly on point, but I’m reminded of how many people I’ve known who go to church precisely because of their attraction to the idea of God as an all-powerful king with zero tolerance for sin and sinners. How to you respond, pastorally, to people who say that you are reducing God to m…

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What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?

…l these scenarios, the West always knows best.   Indeed, the West may know best because the West can change. Islam, on the other hand, is frozen, stuck in what Dipesh Chakrabarty called the “waiting room of history.” This is not, by the way, an exclusively French dynamic—the simple and inaccurate binary of a dynamic West and a static Islam, mired in the seventh century or a “medieval mindset” is stunningly common. And equally inaccurate.  Conclusi…

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Hajj Journal:
This Cultural Hajj

…cided on the next best thing from then on: I would do what I thought would best enhance my experience of the hajj and I would stay away from the rest, opting for silence if somebody else’s culture got too close. The variance of different cultural Islams prevented the women in our tent from creating an immediate community for the days ahead. At one point, the group leader wanted to inform the men and women together about the rites of Mina, Arafat,…

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Originalism Needn’t Always Result in Abortion Bans — Just Ask al-Qaʿida?

…rt to consider state-level bans of abortion—or laws on fetal personhood—as best interpreted, from an originalist perspective, as matters of ensoulment or quickening. This, they may argue, would make the private decision on abortion best understood as a question of a constitutional right to religious free exercise. Such debates, held before, are already emerging again. And, when they do, it’s far better to learn from the voices—including Muslim voi…

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Does God Want Jeremy Lin to Win?

…That is a powerful lesson for all of us, religious or not. Faith is at its best when it helps people be better people, whether in terms of kindness, or humility, or following their dreams, or any number of other positive values—just as it’s at its worst when it takes agency away. The particular myths that Tebow or Lin happen to believe in are secondary (and of course, I mean ‘myths’ in the sophisticated sense of stories that give meaning to human…

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NYPD Lied About Islamophobic Third Jihad

…ime for the Mayor to show he’s still a man of the people. He is by far the best Mayor we’ve had on transportation because he takes the subway. Now it’s time for him to show he can be the best Mayor we’ve had for law enforcement, and recognize the daily ways in which communities are victimized by the police. Instead of letting the NYPD take advice from unnamed, unaccountable DHS contractors, partner with experts. NYC has no shortage of top-notch un…

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Teaching World Religion in the Dumpster Fire

…worth exploring, and in a college full of pre-professional majors it is my best-selling general education course, so I will not apologize for trying to complicate the views of future business people, health care professionals and public school teachers.) I struggled, as I suppose most teachers did on that day, to figure out what I would say to my students—some of whom would be triumphant, others grieving, all of them sleep-deprived. In truth, I di…

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