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Melissa Harris-Perry: LGBT Advocates Need Public Progressive Faith

By Peter Montgomery

…equal human and civil rights for lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, same-sex-loving, gender-nonconforming and queer persons is the civil rights agenda of our time.” And, she said, “faith must be part of the work we’re doing.” The religious history of Harris-Perry’s own family has the sweep of an American saga. Her mother, whose Mormon ancestors pushed handcarts across the country to their promised land in Utah, graduated from Brigham Young…

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

By Nathan Schneider

…o from the Elvis sermon to Union Square. Since the Highline Ballroom is on West 16th Street, we walked with the audience straight east four avenues to the old pavilion. It is rare that we create a stage show thinking that it will make an activist event work. We count ourselves lucky if we get to a bank lobby or a Starbucks cash register to make a public gesture together with a song and prayer to tie it up at the end. An activist campaign takes mon…

Speaking for Hinduism in the Absence of a Conversation

By Murali Balaji

…n any field of study (activism, for example, led to the creation of African-American Studies, women’s studies, queer studies, and other ethnic studies), which is why Shukla’s innocuous call for more engagement with Hindus in the study of Hinduism is hardly as ominous as Jerryson claims. The Legacy of Orientalism I’ll conclude with why HAF’s criticisms of Doniger’s scholarship resonates in both academic and non-academic circles. Unlike the study of…

Everything You Think You Know About the Dark Ages is Wrong

By Nancy Marie Brown

…eading room of the National Library of France, a bright, hushed room, floor-to-ceiling bookcases to my left, floor-to-ceiling windows to my right, ranks of long tables studded with wooden bookrests and velvet rolls to gently prop open the fragile parchment pages. Most of the chairs were filled with hunched-over scholars. To be admitted, I had to write ahead and state my credentials, submit to an interview, show my passport, prove myself a “scholar…

Breivik’s Emasculation Paranoia Fueled Vision for Patriarchal “Reforms”

By Julie Ingersoll

…king points of the religious right. The driving anti-feminist thesis of his 1,500-page manifesto is basically this: feminists emasculate men such that they can no longer defend their cultures from jihadist efforts at world domination; and because feminism has made it possible for women to choose to limit reproduction, it has given a demographic advantage to supposed Muslim strategies to win control by outnumbering everyone else. In a rather Hobbes…

Why Are Some Muslims Calling to Replace GMT with Mecca Time?

By Salman Hameed

…lim world, as any other approach will directly feed into the resurgent anti-Western narrative, which unfortunately the Western media often only reinforces. For example, the Daily Telegraph ended its story on the calls to adopt Mecca Time and the geological uniqueness of Mecca with the following disclaimer: “Western scientists have challenged such assertions, noting that the Magnetic North Pole is in actual fact on a line of longitude that passes t…

The Ground Zero-Sum Game

By Reuven Firestone

…n, the lethal bombings in London and Madrid, and the nature of reaction by key Western leaders to these events. Given the deep suspicion of Islam so deeply imbedded in our culture and the horrendous nature of these attacks, the activation of Islamophobic bigotry is not surprising. Discussions on the Web about the proposed Islamic Center planned to be built near Ground Zero repeat patterns of thinking established centuries ago by medieval polemicis…

I Know Why a Rain Dance Won’t End The Drought

By Johnny P. Flynn

…in my Potawatomi tribe or in any other tribe across the Americas. My great-grandfather Mose Bruno was well-known down in Oklahoma as someone who could more often than not successfully predict the weather. But as far as I know he had no song or dance that could change it. I should add a caveat—a family secret as it were. Whenever we have our ceremonies, conducted in a rather leaky round house, and a storm is coming our way? One of my relatives wi…

Rick Perry and the New Apostolic Reformation

By Sarah Posner

…. Nor is the Republican dance with spirit-filled, demon-casting-out, laying-on-of-hands Pentecostals new. Bright, incidentally, played a crucial role during the Reagan era of bringing Pentecostals—you know, those spirit-filled people with all those bizarre beliefs and worship practices—into the political fold. As I wrote in 2008 after Virginia Beach Pentecostal pastor John Gimenez died of a stroke at the age of 76: Gimenez was not well known outsi…

New Study: Three-Quarters of American Giving Goes to Religion

By Jay Michaelson

…and Tea Party Right(s) have their way, these institutions, supported by non-religious-purpose donations, can fire gays, banish contraception from their employees’ health plans, and maintain discriminatory practices like refusing to allow children to be adopted by same-sex families. (Incidentally, the religious right has had its way. The version of the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) supported by the mainstream LGBT movement exclud…