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Milquetoast Liberal Religion Won’t Challenge Conservative Values: A History Lesson

…funds for poverty alleviation or affordable housing, or, as they are doing today, for an extension of unemployment insurance or a raise in the minimum wage, but they dare not question the underlying structures that create poverty or homelessness or long-term unemployment. The more they were targeted by the Right for even these liberal aspirations, the more timid and uninspiring they became. In the liberal pews there is rarely a naming of the “prin…

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10 Media Rules for Effective Theology

…a devoted pamphleteer, never had an unpublished thought. If he were alive today, there’d be a “Grace-Upon-Grace.com” web site emitting plenty of tweets, pokes and emails. Follow his example. 9. Lose the old polarities. Again, ’tis sacrilege to suggest that liberal-conservative poles no longer define theological argument. However, the waning influence of the religious right, demonstrated by the election of a U.S. president who’s trying to reach be…

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Yom Kippur Prayers for Corporate Atonement at Occupy Wall St.

…financial doom while their futures were sold from the rich to the richer.  Today, as we think about how commitments must be contemplated in the context of right and wrong, of earth and heaven, we know that those notes have no moral weight, that banks can’t and shouldn’t own the futures of people who work, and that it’s time for the bankers to abandon their claims on everyday people’s futures. I will leave it to another [on this day] to think about…

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Pop-Eye: Meat The Wrestler

…bsolute devotion to the sex, violence, and drugs of the film. Christianity Today’s review makes one wonder why they even reviewed it in the first place, as it seems to indicate the film has nothing to do either with “Christianity,” or “today” for that matter. More specifically, it’s curious how few religiously-oriented reviewing outlets were able to see possible symbolic references to, say, Abraham and Isaac, Jesus, or others. So, I’m left wonderi…

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Keep Jews Interesting: It’s Time to Stop Being Defined by Anti-Semitism

…xceptionalism that we have promoted for millennia from the Hebrew Bible to today? It is, in a way, the dark side of chosenness. If we say, “God, who is the creator of the universe, chooses the Jews above all others,” and promote that view by pointing to holy scripture, is it surprising that some of those others will hold negative opinions of us? This is what Spinoza argued. If you think this sounds provocative, it’s actually sewn into our very tra…

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The Economy is Racism: Ending Race-Based Economic Violence is the Real Challenge of This Moment

…mer Confederate states could contribute to that project. If you are one of today’s activist allies who thinks that doing better today than those feckless Abolitionists did back then amounts to a low bar, please think again—and don’t flatter yourself. There are no shortcuts and no quick fixes to be had in meeting the challenge we face now. It’s going to be a revolution—a new social contract with new power arrangements—or nothing. Beware of any fait…

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Uganda’s Anti-Gay Bill Reintroduced in Parliament Today

…nfamous kill-the-gays bill has been reintroduced in Parliament. The bill stalled last year in the face of international pressure, including condemnation from the U.S. State Department, but its backers have never given up. The legislation and the violent anti-gay rhetoric promoted by its supporters have been part of a wave of anti-gay campaigns in Africa backed by American anti-gay evangelicals. That campaign has had deadly consequences: just over…

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Election Day: Hope, Heartbreak, Naiveté, and Studs Terkel

…of the land, even he had to admit something in America was now different. Today, regardless of which side wins, history will be made. Forty-five years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. hoped that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Isn’t that what every religion seeks—a time when the service and character of each individual is recognized…

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Religion, Morality, and the Death of the American Soap Opera

…undermining the war morale, distracting women with addictive stories that promoted destructive values. To label something a “soap opera” today still implies that what you are describing involves immature behavior, improbable plot twists, and/or unseemly sexual liaisons. Soap opera fans themselves have consistently been characterized as immature, psychologically weak, or missing something crucial in their lives. As a result, those who watch soaps…

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Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus?

…edieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. A binding might include a bit of Chaucer—something from the life of St. Bridget, perhaps—and part of an almanac, or a treatise on herbal remedies. They were mash-ups, that is. Or, to borrow terminology from George P. Landow, they were “dispersed texts,” unburdened by the modern fiction of sequential ordering of thought as “natural” or unitary authorship as normative…

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