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Syria and the American Apocalyptic Imagination: Isaiah 17:1 as “Evidence” of the End

…ode of “religion” with those of other bodies of/in evidence seems to me to signal other means by which “religion” takes shape in the public imagination, and by which it both performs and flouts convention. Religion and the state co-emerge in discourses about American responsibility and Syrian chaos, together standing for the violence of ontological breakings into and breakings down of the “communal World” as it appears to custom, and figuring equa…

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My God, David Brooks

…nd that is how Brooks sells himself and his politics—he is a choice engine—promoting choice, heralding the individual, and spreading the gospel far and wide, enabling more decisions to be executed by you by making your life easier—you do not have to read Taylor after all! And here I must offer a requisite disclosure: I have read A Secular Age and I am on record as a critic of Taylor’s framing of modernity. Although I am fearless when I talk trash…

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California Inmates Protest the Abuse of Long-Term Solitary Confinement

…. NRCAT offers practical tools for ending torture in US Prisons, including signing the national statement against prolonged solitary confinement. NRCAT and AFSC, as part of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition, are also in the process of releasing a letter for religious leaders to sign that is addressed to Governor Brown calling on him to honor the five core demands of the hunger strikers. Why should religious communities stand in solid…

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Pope Francis and the American Sisters

…liturgical act of washing two women out of twelve in 2000 years really the sign of the ‘feministization’ of the Roman Catholic Church? Not by my lights. Rather than washing feet, I suggest looking Catholic women in the eye and saying, “You are my sister, equal in every way to me,” and then changing structures accordingly. To atone for centuries of discrimination against women will take more than four clean female feet. I despair of those who say,…

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Christian Colleges, Gay Faculty—and the Boy Scouts

…aks my heart. I am not ‘out’ where I teach; although I was not required to sign any document about my sexuality, it is not safe for me to be open. Am I the sole gay faculty at a Christian college? No, I am not. There are others. Someday, given the movement in the wider culture on LGBT issues, I think some Christian colleges will change and will welcome openly LGBT faculty, but for now, Christian colleges and Boy Scouts are running neck and neck in…

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A Queer Atheist In the Heart of Mormon Country

…spoken at several evangelical Christian colleges that require students to sign agreements that prohibit “homosexual activity” and disbelief in God. These are instituions that would likely expel me were I a student. Agreeing to visit these campuses isn’t easy, but they are communities that perhaps need open conversations about faith and diversity more than many others. Though getting there requires me to deal with my own discomfort, I have never r…

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A Long History of Blaming the Jews

…by those who, in the pride of their kingdom, put the Lord to death.” By consigning Jews to the theological status of servus, or slave, Augustine laid the intellectual groundwork for the political status of Jews a millennium later. In the Middle Ages, European monarchs “insisted that the Jews belonged to them in a peculiar way, different from that of their other subjects” (emphasis Nirenberg’s). Thus the king could use the Jews as tax collectors an…

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“We Want Everyone to Come to the Family Reunion”

…at Mormons for Equality will have its own delegation in the parade. Mormons who want to participate have a choice to decide how they will identify. For Mormons Building Bridges, our theme this year is “Family Reunion.” We are asking people to march in family groups and make a sign with their family name. We feel like family reunions are great Mormon events but they are often very fraught for gay people, who might ask themselves, “Can I come? Can I…

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

…k Street, which still has the faded outline of its Burlington Coat Factory sign on the front, and at least one NYPD officer standing quietly outside. The fact that the Arab-American neighborhood pre-exists the destruction of the towers flips their script about “Muslim” vs. “American.” Of course, the majority of Arabs who immigrated to the United States in the Little Syria era were Christians, some trying to escape the Ottoman Empire’s new policy o…

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

…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 that his head had yet to really grow into… these are things I’ve seen in my own house, that I associate with one of the people I love most in the world. And, yes, God help me, the fact that Martin Richard is white, lives in the U.S., and speaks English makes it seem like “he…

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