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Watching Preachers’ Daughters Right After the Boston Bombings While Teaching a Class on Augustine’s Confessions

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ews that a child has died. But when I heard about Martin Richard, the eight-year-old bombing victim, my mind did what human brains do—tried to explain the incomprehensible in terms of the familiar—and discovered to its horror that there was a lot that seemed familiar. From Martin Richard’s gap-toothed grin, to the way his “No More Hurting People” sign was clearly carefully printed yet switched between upper and lower case, to the long eyelashes th…

Why the ‘Confession & Redemption’ Path is Unlikely to Help Falwell Recover from Sex Scandal

By Chrissy Stroop

…in his denial of Granda’s narrative. Monday offered plenty of exciting will-he-or-won’t-he drama around Falwell’s resignation, which Liberty’s board claimed had been tendered, only to have Falwell deny the claim and insist on further negotiations, after which Falwell reversed himself late Monday night and announced he was resigning after all. But mostly it offered schadenfreude, resulting in plenty of jokes from those who find catharsis in seeing…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…ssistance to Croatian and Bosnian Serbs led to the massacre of tens of thousands. Muslims are, as we speak, the target of horrible persecution in Myanmar, a record of anti-Muslim bigotry that goes back almost to the founding of independent Burma, as it was then called. Their rights are denied in Xinjiang, properly East Turkestan, except they have no Dalai Lama-like figure to draw attention to their plight. (Who’s going to stand up to China anyway?…

An Open Letter to Black Clergy on the Disdain for Protest

By Rev. Osagyefo Sekou

…egations in the palm of your hand with rhetorical flourishes, giving a beat-down-people strength to live another day. Your words helped to re-constitute an assaulted black self—with respectability, dignity and self-determination. I studied how you mounted the sacred desk. The way that you ‘took and walked’ a text was a dissertation in performance and homiletical studies. I took avid notes. Elegant mothers wearing peacock hats; disciplined ushers,…

The Same Toxic Christian Right Theology Supports Both the Online Bullying I Experienced and the Cruel Anti-Trans Policy in TX — And it’s Not Remotely Fringe

By Chrissy Stroop

…hey started with a state CPS employee, referred to as “Jane Doe,” who has a 16-year-old transgender daughter (“Mary Doe”) and says she feels “betrayed by my state and the agency for whom I work.” In light of this development, Texas has unequivocally become ground zero for the nationwide assault on trans people being carried out by the Christian Right and the GOP—an assault that’s advancing to disturbing degrees in a number of Republican-controlled…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…tion-year documentary (based on his book The Roots of Obama’s Rage) with my 19-year-old daughter, Chassé. As someone who is now a secular progressive single mom of seven kids, five of whom live at home, I wouldn’t normally choose to spend our family’s perpetually-insufficient income to see this Obama-bashing movie, let alone take along one of my kids. But we went because I wanted to see the movie that our former church, a central Nebraska Salvatio…

On the 40th Anniversary of Hyde, A Theological Defense of Reproductive Justice

By Anita Little

…try exam. The other one, for whom scrambling the several hundred needed out-of-pocket was unfeasible, carried her child to term, giving birth a few weeks before prom. Their futures would only continue to diverge. For the past four decades, the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion, has made it nearly impossible for low-income women—predominantly women of color—to obtain a legal abortion. It’s the only procedure ever banned f…

Trump’s Easter Egg Roll: Inauthentic Christianity in a Bunny Suit

By Karen E. Park

…r the children of atheist lesbian couples are simply not welcome here. The cheap paperback Easter stories read by Sanders and Conway—no doubt ordered the day before from Amazon Prime—had nothing to do with teaching, or welcoming, or even celebrating a Christian holiday (inappropriate as that itself would have been at a White House event). As this administration did with its craven and phony defense of “Merry Christmas” as if it were an endangered…

Must We Burn Something to Get Attention?: 50 Years After the Catonsville Nine

By Jason C. Bivins

…ternational Religious Freedom, when Robert Jeffress is the poisonous voice sanctifying the American embassy’s relocation in Israel, when the Vice President of the United States understands Christianity as a “get out of jail free” card used to freely exercise open bigotry, it can seem pretty conclusive that power has prevailed over justice. But consider some other words of Daniel Berrigan’s: “Redeem the times! The times are inexpressibly evil. Chri…

Gambian Prez Rails Against Gay ‘Evil Empire’; Irish Priest Comes Out During Mass; Trans Talk on Tunisian TV Sparks Debate; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…body and others if they knew what gay and lesbians did. “The offer of a one-to-one meeting with an inspector, who was a complete stranger to them, in order to discuss personal matters of sexuality was also viewed with alarm by some parents. “It is clear that many of the questions asked are viewed by parents as wholly inappropriate, particularly given the age of the children involved.” A spokesman for the Office for Standards in Education, Children…