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“Fast for Families” Immigration Reform Effort Enters 20th Day

By Joanna Brooks

…our dependence on God.” Fasting is also a significant faith practice for Mormons, who routinely fast the first Sunday of each month as well as at times of heightened spiritual need. One of the seventeen original fasters, Cristian Avila, is a young LDS immigration activist from Phoenix, Arizona. As Cristian grew too weak to continue his fast in public, Sam Adair, a self-described “active” Mormon, father of three and immigration attorney from Au…

Escape From Manhattan: Tech, Tragedy and Storytelling in Sandy’s Wake

By Rachel Wagner

…And nobody can deny the convenience of ready access to information, maps, phone numbers, calendars, and social satisfaction that our reliance on technology provides. Technology is a tool, right? It doesn’t change who we are, right? It doesn’t blind us—it reveals reality by connecting us and showing us the world via our screens… right? Look, I know that our new imaginative, mediated work is doing good. I know people can feel a real sense of empowe…

Church Uses Facebook for Sacramental Scrutiny at its Peril

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ightly causing concern. But the overall culture of the internet, as it has morphed into social and mobile forms that have shaped relational practice both on- and offline, has generally retained the democratic, collaborative, transparent, and dialogical ethos of its earliest enthusiasts. No reasonable communicator these days, then, expects a passive mass of consumers to gobble up a magisterially-broadcast message whole, not having the opportunity…

Becoming Forever Lonesome: How Violence Changes Us

By Amanda Robb

…ould so happy. By the time the mother was halfway to the school the DJ had more news. Most of the shooting took place in the school library. There appeared to be fatalities. The mother was still focused on her mission. Getting to the school. But SWAT teams had set up a perimeter. Trucks. Sharp shooters. Big dogs. It looked like a war. It looked like a Bruce Willis movie. People in uniforms told the mother to go to an elementary school across the w…

What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?

By Haroon Moghul

…adin the magnanimous warrior. Frazier presents a history that assumes a common set of motivations for actors in very different contexts. At the same time, he goes out of his way to try to humanize Russia and Siberia in particular. Ian Frazier’s book came to my attention when it was excerpted in The New Yorker; as it turns out, The New Yorker funded his expedition. Now, of course, I don’t think his opinions of Islamic history are that magazine’s,…

Romney Had No Clue as to Obama Ground Game

By Joanna Brooks

…Unless by “data-driven analyst” he means is a guy who knows how to arrange numbers on a page to make a case just plausible enough secure buy-in from a cultivated crew of underwriters and investors who are already inclined to believe him. Which, actually, just may be what “data-driven analyst” means these days. I don’t believe that spreadsheets are a scale model of reality. I do believe that professional political directors should have a grip on r…

A Faith-Based Opportunity for Obama

By Sarah Posner

…ritics believe that the office would have performed better had DuBois been more experienced and the office given more stature. According to this thinking, clashes with Catholic groups, particularly the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, over the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act, could have been alleviated. But as yesterday’s statement from the USCCB on the latest proposed rule from the Department of Health and Human Serv…

Intensive Care: Preachers’ Daughters Episode Five Recap

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…episode where cast members express confidence in God’s control. And those moments are all the more poignant in light of the fact that, this episode, we’re see some of them not quite knowing what’s going to happen, or not quite getting what they had hoped for. Well, anyway. Here’s hoping Ken Coleman has recovered by now, and that he and Marie spent last evening watching the show and reminiscing about the hospital trip that proved to be less serio…

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

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…of the “Pen Group” of Syrian-Lebanese writers that also included the much-more-famous Kahlil Gibran. For Fine, the Save Washington Street 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 activist…

Christian Atheism: The Only Response Worth its Salt to the Zimmerman Verdict

By J. Kameron Carter

…t rather the courage to name its idolatries so that we can be a different, more just United States of America, “not a perfect, but a more perfect union,” as President Barack Obama said last week in his most poignant comments to-date on race in America. And just as we cannot talk about god-in-the-abstract, nor can we speak of idolatry-in-the-abstract. The white, western god-man is an idol that seeks to determine what is normal. It is a norm by whic…