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Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…the church had ordained the first African-American protestant minister; in 1853 ordained the first woman as clergy since New Testament times; and in 1972 ordained the first openly gay person. So it was no surprise that when marriage equality overcame the last legal hurdle in Arizona, Dorhauer found himself standing in that tradition with other progressive clergy outside the Maricopa County Courthouse holding a sign stating: “We stand ready to mar…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…ve. Thousands of veterans came home with severe combat stress. But “between 1968 and 1980 no official diagnosis for stress disorders was available,” Andreasen writes. PTSD entered the lexicon with the 1980 publication of DSM-III. If we imagine the range of human experiences as a landscape, then the creation of a diagnosis is bit like a incorporating a city. It does not create the houses or the people who live there, but it gives them boundaries wi…

For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

By Lynne Gerber

…v. Carl Beans to his seemingly endless hospital visits in the AIDS units of 1980s Los Angeles. Rev. Penny Nixon, who ministered in MCC’s San Francisco congregation in the 1990s, felt bodily memories of AIDS ministry rise in the first few weeks of Covid and then recede in the face of the also-familiar need to put feelings away and get to work. “How we got through the last pandemic,” she said, “it became the reality. You put your head down and you d…

Discovering “Little Syria”—New York’s Long-Lost Arab Neighborhood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…e to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to the south, the building of which in the 1940s destroyed most of the last residential buildings via eminent domain. In the 1960s, the building of the World Trade Center took care of much of the rest. The tunnel to the south, the tower to the north, but even in the 1980s, there were still “pockets” of human-scaled buildings dating back to the early 19th century. The 9/11 attacks not only destroyed the World Trade…

A Portrait of Islamophobia?

By Mariam Durrani

…en fruit bowl, a few artificial flowers, half a bottle of Sprite, and some phone chargers. The two smaller images feature the cluttered interior of a walk-in closet with a bunch of clothes and a faint family portrait on the wireframe shelf, and something that will be familiar to anyone with a newborn child: a rocking seat next to a pink and yellow baby mat. With the caption “A Home Revealed,” the audience is left to make sense of these household p…

Does It Matter If Islam Is A Religion? An American Ahmadi Explains The Effects Of Religious Discrimination

By Daniel Schultz

…gns, but it didn’t work out well for either of them. Bhutto was executed in 1989, and Zia died in a 1988 plane crash rumored to have been an assassination. Yet the anti-Ahmadi laws remain, according to Khurram Ahmad, because “nobody wants to now tackle this beast.” Even to suggest reining in the law can be dangerous: two legislators were murdered for trying to put safeguards around the law. *** Ahmad is the unassuming leader of the Ahmadiyya Musli…

Dear Lindsay Lohan, I’m Sorry

By Haroon Moghul

…at, and I apologize for being part of such a mean gesture. In fact I had a phone conversation with a prominent American imam last night—in Islam, we say subhanallah at such coincidences—and he mentioned in passing how offended many white American Muslims were by this very kind of gesture. On reflection, I can see why. I don’t find racial insensitivity humorous directed at me. The least I can do is not support it. And the least I can do is the leas…

How Do We Break the Cycle of Religious Violence in South Asia?

By Sunita Viswanath

…religiously-motivated pogroms afterwards. A few weeks ago, I spoke on the phone with a leader of New York City’s Bangladeshi Hindu community, who was extremely resistant to making the connection between the persecution of his fellow Hindus in Bangladesh and the persecution of Muslims in India. He insisted, “Please don’t tell me about India. I only want to focus on my people, Hindus in Bangladesh.” I suggested that there was folly in focusing on t…

Mormons Prepare for WA Marriage Equality Fight

By Joanna Brooks

…ian, Idaho, and I was pretty virulently homophobic. Back in high school, in 1994, there were protests when a lesbian couple was brought to speak at our high school. Go back and look at the newspapers from that moment, and you’ll see pictures of a young Scott Holley protesting against the teachers who brought gay people into our high school. I moved to Massachuestts in 2004 with my wife, just in time for Massachusetts to become the first state to…

Denying Communion to Prochoice Politicians

By Frances Kissling

Julia Duin, religion writer for the Washington Times in a column on March 12 attempts to rekindle the dying embers of the 2004 election campaign debate about denying communion to politicians who disagree with the Vatican’s position on abortion. Duin speculates about the fate of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius soon to take up residence in the Diocese of Washington DC as HHS secretary. Sebelius a pro-choice Catholic has had the misfortune of livi…