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The Revolujah! Will Be Performed: Reverend Billy’s Reality Joke

…on of performance and preaching. How would you characterize it? KL: At his best, Reverend Billy is the love child of Billy Graham and Allen Ginsberg. I think he, like many American activists, is invested in a sort of self-promoting iconoclasm in order to bring about greater equality. Like many American preachers, he invents a new consensus in his speech in order to develop the broadest base. And, like many in the avant-garde, he suggests his perso…

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Ann Romney’s Big Night at the RNC

…s and coverage that oppose what most American women understand to be their best interests. In this difficult position, the best Ann Romney could do was emphasize the relational model to which political wives are so often tethered. I remember that Michelle Obama did it in 2008, describing the moment when Barack drove his baby daughter home from the hospital, so we women would see him as someone to trust. It’s a model that leads women to that close,…

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Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

…r Christian apologist and avid blogger, who noted that Dr. Robin DiAngelo, best known for her book White Fragility, had partnered with the United Methodist Church to explore the topic of white privilege in a video lecture. Metaxas took this announcement as an opportunity to mock and critique the notion of white privilege: “Did [Jesus] have ‘white privilege’ even though he was entirely without sin? Is the United Methodist Church covering that? I th…

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Unreleased Religious Freedom Manifesto Isn’t the Culture War Compromise It Hopes to Be

…n-sponsored Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies, perhaps best known for its open letter to Hillary Clinton, days before the 2016 election, challenging the candidate on her support for reproductive health and failure to support religious freedom in the face of “a well-financed war… being waged by the gay and lesbian community”; and William Galston, a Wall Street Journal columnist and Brookings Institution scholar who was a leader…

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Rites, Rituals, and the King

…o. What is more, one feature of ritual is that the “message” is not self encoded. That is why I keep making a distinction between this and what we mostly understand when we use the word prayer in English. Prayer is all about our immediate status. “Help me get through this”, “Give me an A on the exam”, “make her heart turn to love me”, “Grant me a successful hajj.” etc. Worship responds to a higher level in fact, the highest level of formality. Eve…

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The Battle for the Meaning of Religious Freedom Day

…om may very well determine the future of democracy in our time, just as it did in the 18th century. As historian John Ragosta told RD last year: A republic could not work if government and church officials… were trying to control what we think or prescribe what was the ‘best’ religion or which people were the ‘best’ citizens based upon their religious beliefs. If people were to make informed political choices themselves, they had to be free to thi…

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Escalating Afghanistan: What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?

…ctly private property in the manner of Athenian slaves; rather, they could best be described as serfs or slaves of the public: available and expected to do the public’s bloody business of conquest and pillage. Let us say it clearly and see how it feels upon the tongue: today’s “all-volunteer” military represents a contemporary form of helotry. We give the great majority of our young very little hope for a foothold in our collapsed economy; then we…

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No Longer At Sea: Kate Bornstein Talks Scientology

…if a woman proposed to a man, and the man and woman got married, he would promote her one grade in rank. That was the first move toward institutionalized heteronormativity within Scientology. By all accounts, there was no sexual impropriety with any of the young girls who served as his Messengers. People saw him more as a father figure. That’s not quite true. There was no genital sex or inappropriate touching. But what would you call it when you…

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In Trump’s America, a Reminder of Our Prophetic Past

…ice commitment grew, Merton was unflinching in critiquing his earliest and best-known work, The Seven Storey Mountain, for being so focused on the importance of contemplation as to be acquiescent in relation to social injustice. But Raboteau is at his very best in evoking Howard Thurman’s under-appreciated greatness: his distinctive and powerful nature-based mysticism, his prescience in respect to the spiritual cost of environmental degradation, h…

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“Giving Godhead”: A Bloody Vision of Religion’s Deepest Influence

…arden and times how quickly we snatch for a fig leaf. Krieger is after the codes that get ingrained, that run in the background, that make us think a certain way about, say, virginity, or sovereignty, those triggers that flip circuits such that suffering immediately flashes in the backs of our mind as redemptive, death as sacrifice, and so on. Poison, she might say: brainwashing with a dirty sponge. Despite Simmons’s hagiographic comment regarding…

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