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

By Frederick Clarkson

…rom its birth. In Beyond Resistance, you suggest that some churches should stop struggling and to plan to “die with dignity.” You’ve also said that “the best days of the United Church of Christ are ahead of us.” What do the best days look like in a time of managing what you’ve called “diminishment”? For me, it is important to see the 1957 merger that created the United Church of Christ—not as the establishment of an institutional expression of the…

Dear Lindsay Lohan, I’m Sorry

By Haroon Moghul

…humorous directed at me. The least I can do is not support it. And the least I can do is the least I can do. There are not many white Muslim converts in America, proportionally speaking, and I’m sure sometimes they feel overrun by the preponderance of brown. (Get used to it, world. Rabbits breed like us.) And sometimes humor does go too far. But the real reason I’m writing, Lindsay, isn’t because of that—although I am sorry—or even Mean Girls, on…

Refusing Religion, Claiming the Future: A Roundtable Discussion on “The Nones Are Alright”

By Peter Laarman

…ion and have no interest in returning or pursuing a spiritual/religious quest. Most, I would think, for many of the same reasons that we hear in Kaya’s book. Others are still interested in being Christian, but are completely disinterested in being evangelical. This manifests itself in a small percentage heading for Mainline Protestant or Catholic churches, but most are either sticking it out or forming other kinds of churches and communities that…

Gay, Christian, Pagan, Artist: How Matt Morris Defies the Borders of Spiritual Identity

By Jesse James DeConto

…I felt like it wasn’t progressive enough. This is about the time that I just started to meander into metaphysical bookstores and start to explore a different language around ethics and belief and spirituality. On your most recent album, When Everything Breaks Open, you’ve got a song “Bloodline” where you sing, “God loves her more than the Christians do.” This is a common (and potent) critique of the church in our spiritual-but-not-religious age….

Can You Make a Comedy About UFO Cult Mass Suicide?

By Joseph Laycock

…elieve our anxiety that our own religious beliefs and practices might be just as strange as than those of the cult. But satire can just as easily call these distinctions into question. In 1998 The Simpsons aired an episode about cults in which Bart opines: “Church, cult, cult, church. So we’ll get bored someplace else every Sunday. Does this really change our everyday lives?” I met with filmmaker David Jones at a south Austin cafe to discuss his p…

The Only Religion Question Reporters and Debate Moderators Should Ask Presidential Candidates (Kim Davis Edition)

By Sarah Posner

…now how proud I am of her for not abandoning her religious convictions and standing strong for religious liberty,” the former pastor, Arkansas governor, and now two-time presidential candidate said in a statement. Arguing that “the Supreme Court cannot and did not make a law,” but only a “ruling on a law,” Huckabee maintained that “Kim does not have the Constitutional authority to issue a marriage license to homosexual couples.” Davis will be in f…

Reporting from Paris: A Prayer for Polluters

By Donna Schaper

…ing don’t go far enough. . . . These unenforceable “commitments” are, at best, a step in the right direction and, at worse, a way for government leaders to try to fool their citizens and, perhaps, themselves into thinking they are doing the right thing. If this sounds familiar, it should: big companies have been promising to cut their carbon output for a decade or more, setting targets and timelines of their own choosing. It hasn’t worked. Emissio…

A Portrait of Islamophobia?

By Mariam Durrani

…eads many white audience members to make quick assumptions using the quickest, stereotypic misunderstandings about the minority group in question. We saw the same during the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson and the media’s use of his image to portray a large, black male (read as ‘thuggish’), rather than an 18-year-old high school graduate about to start his college career. With hashtags (#IfTheyGunnedMeDown), Black Twitter immediately drew atten…

Oprah, Terrorist Cells, and the Meaning of Life: An Interview with Paul Froese

By Andrew Aghapour

…d issues of moral meaning and individual purpose. I found that people in post-industrial countries tend to be less likely to say, “I know what my purpose in life is.” This probably has to do with pluralism. In post-industrial countries you have more religious and philosophical options, and with that comes the possibility that life can be completely meaningless. So then the question is: Who picks that option? Are they free, or forced into it by cho…

The Sacred and the Dead: Ten Writers on the End of an American Adventure

By The Editors

…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. #5 : Three Ways to American Beauty by Aaron K. Kerr At the height of secular modernity, when Catholics were openi…