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Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…n political and sexual oppression. Mormonism was equated to white slavery. Bestselling authors such Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Zane Grey cast Mormons as depraved villains. Latter-day Saints were variously likened to “Oriental,” “Asiatic,” “Turkish,” and “Mohammedan” peoples. Even today, more than 120 years after the prophet Wilford Woodruff officially disavowed the practice of polygamy, the media routinely conflates the LDS Church with Mormon fund…

Vatican Council on Women Would Be Funny Were it Not So Insulting

By Mary E. Hunt

…t the subject would change in a hurry. More troubling is what might be the best section of the paper on aggression toward women. Even in this part of the text, there is no clear analysis of kyriarchal structures that create the conditions of women’s servitude. Rather, there is victim blaming: Women cowed by depression…who accept a level of presumed inferiority… (p. 8) Tell that to children and teens trafficked by greedy men in prostitution. The qu…

Celebrating Religious Freedom Day By Taking Back the Revolutionary Meaning of ‘Religious Freedom’

By Frederick Clarkson

…eye on the present and plan to ensure our rights for future generations as best we can. All sides sometimes conflate religion or “faith” with religious freedom. But religious freedom according to the Virginia Statute and the First Amendment is not about religion. Religious freedom is about the right to believe as you will. Much like the right to vote is not the same as voting. I think we can learn to better connect the right to religious freedom w…

The Myth of “King David” Petraeus and Iraq

By Ira Chernus

…on at all. Indeed, by now some scholars of religion have decided that it’s best to jettison the word altogether. I have long carried that lesson over into my analyses of contemporary issues of war and peace in America, hesitating to use the term “myth” because of its imprecision. But now I’m tending to think that the advantages of using it outweigh the disadvantages. It has long been painfully obvious that empirical reality plays far too small a r…

Trump’s Magical Appeal: A Dated Anthropologist Offers Clues

By Elijah Siegler

…rank and authority of a chief or king,” he wrote in The Golden Bough, the best of them “perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother and to play on his superstition for their own advantage. Not that the sorcerer is always a knave and impostor; he is often sincerely convinced that he really possesses those wonderful powers which the credulity of his fellows ascribes to him.” The savviest magician-king, in other words, tells the people what…

“Living in Favor, Abundance, and Joy” (Unless You’re Gay)

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…they tend to be ‘some of the nicest people in the world.’” Just not God’s best. Some of those nice, close friends of Joel’s may want to have a few words with him after his appearance this week on Piers Morgan’s new talk show on CNN. He again reiterates assessment of who might or might not get a good grade from God, and then takes it another step further to call some of his closest friends “sinners,” because “the scripture clearly shows that it’s…

A Call for Heresy

By Anouar Majid

…itten? Yes. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. It’s the best love story I’ve read. This may sound totally unrelated to my work on Islam, globalization, heresy, etc., but what more powerful theme in life than love? It is love that we need—real, palpable love, with uncontrollable passions and total surrender to the pull of emotions. This may be the best antidote to the cold passions of war, terrorism, and violence in general. To b…

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

By Frederick Clarkson

…p 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 church or the creation of a new denominational identity, but as the birth of…

In Praise of Mary Magdalene

By Garret Keizer

…f God is dead, Mary will see to the corpse. When The God Delusion tops the best seller list, she’s the one dusting off the Torah scrolls in the discount bin. If there is a path beyond belief and beyond atheism—which, after all, is but another form of belief, and lately a rather fundamentalist form to boot—Mary Magdalene walks that path. I have met others walking it with her, carrying their disillusionment like a cross. And still they show up, in p…

The Mystic in the Rye: JD Salinger’s Religious Fiction

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…at you must be longing to hear now. That is, if as I know you do, you love best in this world those little beings of pure spirit with a natural temperature of 125, then it naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person—the God-knower or God-hater (almost never apparently anything in between), the saint or profligate, moralist or complete immoralist—who can write a poem that is a poem. Among human beings, he’s the curlew sandp…