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Angry Voters, Right-Wing Populism, & Racial Violence: People of Faith Can Help Break the Linkages

By Chip Berlet

…up with the Rev. David Ostendorf by cell phone while he is waiting for a plane at an East Coast airport. He is the executive director of the CNC where Ward works. Ostendorf, A United Church of Christ minister, once led PrairieFire Rural Action, a group that tried to save family farms during a major agricultural economic crisis in the 1980s. “Back then we helped build a popular economic political movement among family farmers across the country se…

The Many, Not the Few: An Anthem for Occupy

By Elizabeth Drescher

…e a video of the performance, despite a Secret Service prohibition on cell phones, because Makana’s guitar is tuned with a smartphone app. Or, reporters are interested in how Obama, his guests, and security detail responded—or didn’t, as it turned out. But this misses the heart of the story, as Makana’s set at the APEC dinner was less dissenting performance than performative utterance—the songs he played, the protest t-shirt hidden beneath the com…

Departure of the Queen

By Amina Wadud

…ustle of the cities and even from my own family that makes me feel a bit melancholy. I should probably catch ride outside the gates of the estate where I can have bars for my cell phone and get in touch with them later today. Before the shaykh arrives, I continue with my Qur’an reading. I don’t use the tiny mp3 player anymore because this last juz’ includes most of the Qur’an that I have memorized myself, and this is more a review than a simple re…

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…

ACLU and Thomas More Law Center Rush to Terry Jones Defense

By Lauri Lebo

…f Rights — it’s not all that strange of a twist. In 1977, it defended the Klan’s right to march in the Holocaust survivor enclave of Skokie, Illinois. It has also defended Rush Limbaugh, so there you go. Still, it always makes for an interesting conundrum when the ACLU and TMLC are on the same side of anything. In Jones’ case, fresh off his stint burning a Qu’ran, the Florida pastor decided last week to ride the wave of ill-gotten publicity by goi…

Star Trek: Politics Anti-Matters

By Nathan Schneider

…t universe, since our heroes were representatives of a federation of many planets, was getting along. Star Trek was about overcoming petty differences in the presence of a universe too large and too full of mystery for squabbling. It was, at its core, about creating a society. Society, Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, rests on a dose of healthy repression. This leads me to another point. The golden ages of Star Trek have thrived on…

Becoming Forever Lonesome: How Violence Changes Us

By Amanda Robb

…universals. In a super white, super loud flash… or a DJ’s croon… or a telephone’s brrng brrng, when you become forever lonesome. Because you know the real secret. Anything can happen. Aliens could land. *** Among the outrages of living in a time of violence is that victims feel the need to rank their suffering. “What I suffered pales in comparison,” the Aurora victim who tramped over his dead girlfriend, who still has shrapnel in his own body, t…

Gay Marriage Bill Totalitarian Says Head Bishop

By Peter Montgomery

…t to a totalitarian government deciding “who lives and who dies?” If so, Dolan is forfeiting his right to have his arguments taken seriously by legislators and anyone else. Dolan’s reference to “natural law” mirrors NOM’s use of “natural marriage” and the Manhattan Declaration’s invocation of “natural human reason” to buttress their religious objections to marriage equality with a seemingly universal claim to nature and nature’s God. But as shifts…

Maybe The Question Is: Should Shabbat Be The New Yoga?

By Michael Schulson

…ffers a Pinterest-happy toolkit, and some subsidies, for people trying to plan big, elaborate Shabbat events. There’s also Arq. Its founder, Danya Shults, describes the startup as “a lifestyle brand and media company inspired by Jewish culture and open to all.” The company evolved, in part, out of Pop-Up Shabbat—a kind of mobile, ritual-infused restaurant—that Shults ran in New York. Maybe the most significant player here is Reboot, a nonprofit th…

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…