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What Did the Puritans Have Against Christmas?

By Bruce David Forbes

…o religion and says nothing about a baby in a manger—but it does promote a spirit of giving and care for others that can be embraced by almost anyone. The point here is that the Puritan suppression of Christmas created a vacuum, and when Christmas re-emerged and flourished in the 1800s its new form had less of a religious emphasis and was centered more on family and generosity. Christians could embrace those themes gladly, as very consistent with…

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…

Is the Satanist Behind 10 Commandments Challenge Sincere?

By Joseph Laycock

…hosts, dubious psychotherapists, “cult cops,” and Christians interested in spiritual warfare sent America into hysteria over Satanic conspiracies that resulted in innocent people being prosecuted and imprisoned. Greaves initially assumed stories of criminal Satanists must have some basis in fact. He sought out self-identified Satanists, meeting a priest of the Church of Satan and even former members of The Process Church of the Final Judgment. Whi…

Misusing Cesar Chavez in Immigration Debate

By Luis Leon

…vez staged three public fasts, including the “Love Fast,” begun on February 14, 1968, which ended twenty-five days later with an ecumenical mass in which he broke bread with Robert Kennedy. Each of Chavez’s three public rituals was dubbed a “spiritual fast,” during which he took communion from priests and communed prayerfully with Protestant ministers, rabbis, nuns, and atheists/humanists. Despite posthumous efforts to contain Chavez within an ort…

Does the Multifaith Model Work?

By Jas Chana

…f Biblical Hebrew. Yael is the co-founder and director of NYU’s Center for Spiritual Life and runs the Center with the same spiritual inclusiveness she personally espouses. In a recent article for Inquiring Mind, Shy elaborates on her dual Jewish-Buddhist practice. “I often ask myself, ‘Is it possible to engage in a non-superficial way, in two rich spiritual traditions?’ So, far the answer is a resounding yes!” Yael sees a kind of universality in…

Pagan Martyrs, Murderous Monks: Agora Hits US Shores

By Nathan Schneider

…t religious passions pose to all that is wise and tolerant about the human spirit. Just in time for my own childhood indoctrination (one which I am loathe to disavow), Carl Sagan repeated this telling in his Cosmos TV series. Sagan followed Gibbon in associating Hypatia’s murder with the destruction of Alexandria’s famous library; with her body, away went the literature of the ancient world, lost forever. To remember Hypatia is now to take a stand…

What Good Is It for Union to Gain the World, But Forfeit Its Soul?

By Yazmine Nichols

…the poor. Both passages are damning for those who think themselves either spiritually or materially rich, but fail to recognize their theological poverty. They implore readers to rethink what it means to be rich and suggest true wealth can only be obtained through a process of self-reflection—and more importantly, self-critique. Is today’s liberalism—and its manifestation in schools like Union—rich in rhetoric but poor in empathy? Are liberals no…

One of These Things is Not Like the Other: Religion and the Obama Campaign

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…y. I propose the following as a sort of genealogy of the current confusion. 1) The two main political parties in the United States today are fairly loose coalitions, and since Reagan’s presidential victory in1980, the coalition that fractures worst loses. 2) Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians have been perceived to be a central piece of the center-right Republican coalition since the creation of the “Moral Majority” in 1979. 3) The landscap…

Weeks After Turkey’s Failed Coup, Thousands Have Been Arrested Over a Book

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…ideaway. All of this happened before the attempted coup this summer on July 15. As coups go, it was a botched affair almost from the beginning. Units of the military cordoned off a bridge across the Bosphorus in Istanbul in the early evening when the streets were still crowded. A military helicopter bombed the parliament building in Ankara during the night when it was empty. Erdogan, who was at a resort in the coastal town of Marmaris, escaped cap…

Updated: A Response to President Obama’s Speech in Cairo

By Hussein Rashid

…uggests the opposite: We must face these tensions squarely. And so in that spirit, let me speak as clearly and as plainly as I can about some specific issues that I believe we must finally confront together. Compare this to verse 49:13 of the Qur’an which says God created nations and tribes so that we may know one another and the most noble is the one who is best in their conduct. The allusion is quite obvious, and is geared towards at Muslim audi…