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White House Position
on Exemption from Contraception Coverage
“Not a Done Deal”?

By Sarah Posner

…” The Washington Post reports this morning that Democratic Senators, on a phone call yesterday with White House senior advisor David Plouffe, argued against adopting the Bishops’ position. My source says it’s “not a done deal” yet, but expected action from the White House within a week. UPDATE: Another womens’ rights advocate tells me that she has “no reason to think” that the Obama administration feels it “owes” the Bishops for health care refo…

Dear Lindsay Lohan, I’m Sorry

By Haroon Moghul

…uch a mean gesture. In fact I had a phone conversation with a prominent American imam last night—in Islam, we say subhanallah at such coincidences—and he mentioned in passing how offended many white American Muslims were by this very kind of gesture. On reflection, I can see why. I don’t find racial insensitivity 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 Mu…

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

By Peter Laarman

…any kind of alternative way of doing church or being church for younger African Americans. Is it your impression that black millennials, and young activists in particular, are doing their own version of DIY church or are they drawing their spiritual nourishment in ways that have nothing to do with church in any form? There’s certainly a historical precedent for young justice activists finding it impossible to remain inside quiescent religious ins…

Reporting from Paris: A Prayer for Polluters

By Donna Schaper

…e a caucus proposed a stop fracking resolution. We spent hours on national phone calls debating when fracking should be stopped. We finally proposed 2030 as the last fracking date. It was a compromise after many “brackets,” what COP21 calls the matters that are kept in that famous parking lot where we put the things we don’t know how to decide. The Synod amended our so-called radical proposal and unanimously passed 2017 as the final date. We were…

Whose House? Their House: Just Who Was Held Accountable for the 1/6 Insurrection is Telling

By Susannah Crockford

…ep. Andrew Clyde, called it a “normal tourist visit.” Clyde also helped barricade a door against rioters trying to break into the House Chamber. Crowds broke into the building at eight different locations. They occupied the Senate Chamber and the Rotunda. They invaded congressional offices and stole equipment. Capitol police were forced back and assaulted, beaten with their own equipment, a hockey stick, and an American flag. There were 5 deaths a…

Walking Dead and Zombie Ethics, or “Don’t Fight the Zombies. You Can’t Win”

By Kelly J. Baker

…le: these monsters are a five billion dollar industry. They appear in cell phone ads for Sprint, they chase runners in 5Ks, and they scare crowds at haunted houses and theme parks. With The Walking Dead and World War Z, zombies cemented their reign as the favored monster of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The zombie’s ubiquity begs for explanation, and there is no shortage of theories. David Denby, writing about World War Z …

Discovering “Little Syria”—New York’s Long-Lost Arab Neighborhood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…eet project is part of the same effort. “We are persistent,” he told me by phone, “because these stories have a real impact on people.” Telling stories grounded in real Arab-American history is the only way to reach understanding. And understanding is still sorely needed. One imagines what the Islamophobic activists who conjured the “Ground Zero Mosque” debacle a couple years back would do with the news of an Arab neighborhood in the shadow of the…

James Foley Prayed, But He Was Not a Martyr

By Alana Massey

…ect of both personal and corporate prayer. When he speaks to his mother by phone from Libya, she asks if he has felt the prayers coming from his home as well. He tells her that he has felt them and reports, “Maybe it was others’ prayers strengthening me, keeping me afloat.” This is precisely the kind of hope that prayer can inspire that should become central to the understanding of it for those of us who do not engage in prayer. Though the old aph…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…performed and witnessed through cameras, at a distance of hundreds or thousands of miles. Veteran suicides come to outnumber battlefield deaths. Violence shifts even deeper into the realm of psychology: there’s the pervasive fear of a possible strike, existing alongside the lasting legacy of combat. The final chapters of the Hunger Games series concern themselves with trauma and its aftermath, in unusually naked terms (“I still remain struck with…

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

By Frederick Clarkson

…t Americans to oppose slavery. By 1785 the church had ordained the first African-American protestant minister; in 1853 ordained the first woman as clergy since New Testament times; and in 1972 ordained the first openly gay person. So it was no surprise that when marriage equality overcame the last legal hurdle in Arizona, Dorhauer found himself standing in that tradition with other progressive clergy outside the Maricopa County Courthouse holding…