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Texas Scold ‘Em: Conservative Christians Go on Offensive in Critical Textbook Review

By Lauri Lebo

…aid. The topic of Christmas had already been part of a 6th grade geography class on world religions that included two Christian holidays (Easter and Christmas), two Jewish ones (Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah) and the Muslim observance of Ramadan. In an effort to streamline the curriculum guidelines, the committee proposed listing only one tradition from each religion. Rosh Hashanah and Christmas were dropped. But Staver and Huckabee may have a shor…

How the COVID-19 Pandemic May Permanently Change Our ‘Good Death’ Narrative

By Cody J. Sanders

…tential for a Good Death in ways we haven’t imagined or prepared for. In a class I’m teaching at Chicago Theological Seminary called “A Practical Theology of the Corpse,” I asked my students to describe their notion of a Good Death in the 21st Century. They said the kinds of things you’d probably say, too, if you took a moment to think about the question: dying peacefully and without pain (or at least with well-managed pain), dying in old age, dyi…

When Are You Dead? Science Just Made the Work of Religion a Bit More Difficult

By Arri Eisen

…o very different courses I happened to be teaching in a single day. In one class—of physicians discussing research ethics—a neurologist was very upset. She thought these research findings would be just as likely to make it even more difficult for her and families to decide what to do with those in a vegetative or near-vegetative state. The families might demand the new test, and then, if there is some intentional brain activity, they might be exci…

False Saviors: Trump, Cruz, and the Gospel of the Quick Fix

By Marcia Pally

…deprivation or fear of deprivation. On Dec. 9 Pew reported that the middle class, once the largest, is the majority no longer; median middle class income has dropped 4% since 2000; four middle income jobs that accounted for 60% of employment in 1979 accounted for only 46% by 2012; and the number of persons not in the labor force is growing. While some are getting richer, the numbers tell us, middle income earners are hobbled by shrinking purchasin…

Is Downward Dog the Path to Hell?

By Andrea R. Jain

…d fear. I would argue, however, that what we learn is not about ancient or classical Christian or yoga conceptions of the body and self, but rather about conceptions of the body and self that already dominate our contemporary cultural context. In fact, what scholars of yoga today often refer to as “modern yoga,” a pop-culture movement that in many forms competes in the fitness and health global market, has more in common with contemporary consumer…

Denying Darwin: Another Peculiar American Institution

By Lauri Lebo

…nd’s public schools, shared stories of being taught about the Bible in the classroom. But they also studied the Koran and the Torah. They learned about Hinduism and Buddhism. All students must take a comparative religions class. The notion that this isn’t the case in the United States is surprising to the British. Unlike in the United States, where evangelicals preach that unless you are washed in the blood of Christ you will perish in hell, the B…

A Memoir of Jewish, Transgender Spirituality

By Joy Ladin

…tion of the transgender world, I am very much a product of a white, middle-class, mid-twentieth-century upbringing, I’m a religious (though not Orthodox) Jew, I’m an academic, and so on. But my hope was that by presenting my experience as specifically and intimately as possible, others would recognize aspects of that experience that relate to their own experience of struggling to become and be true to themselves. I also hope to broaden the perspe…

Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Avatar and the Myth of Originality

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…where to achieve the task of salvation; of power structures based on race, class, gender, and disability; of the colonized and the colonizers; and of the inspirations that come from glimpses into other worlds. All this is not to say “I” agree with its overall message. I’m simply trying to account for its Rorschach nature, and for the ways such mythologies operate, get retold, and establish themselves within the continuum of tradition. Until we can…

A Moral Movement Where Everyone Is in For the Long Haul

By Maxine Phillips

…ts the conundrum of the left in the United States—Is the key issue race or class?—and says that both have equal weight. He acknowledges Martin Luther King’s debt to socialist and communist advisers without naming King’s own democratic socialism. He treats sexism tangentially. Above all, he stays on message: We’re here for the long haul. This is a moral movement. We are warp and woof of the same fabric. For us on the left, two challenges to his Thi…

King Hearings: Right to Attorney = Enabling Extremism?

By Hussein Rashid

…e hearings is Constitutional: you cannot single out a group of people as a class for the actions of a few from that class. That’s not equal protection under the law. But while Jasser is absolutely right about the debates that need to happen within religious communities it’s not the government’s job to interfere or dictate which conversations religions have in this country. You cannot protect the Constitution by being unconstitutional. Oddly enough…