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A Color-Blind America? Don’t Fall For The Okey-Doke

…n there was the energy, the unmistakable nervous energy of hundreds of thousands of people gathering for one common purpose. We all knew that we were on the brink of something, but we did not know exactly what. Win or lose, there was so much love, peace, and general enthusiasm—like what I’d heard about Woodstock (less the partial nudity and drugs). This was by all accounts—both classic and contemporary—a religious experience. As an ethnographer, h…

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A Sacred Encounter with Erykah Badu’s Controversial Nude Video

…, “I was thinking about going down there and whoopin’ her…but I was on the phone with the police, too…I called the police…I was very offended. There were too many kids, women, and children down there.” While I am sure that Lewis was concerned about Badu’s nudity in front of the other “women and children,” I imagine she was equally uneasy about the implications of reproducing the violence of slavocracy in a post Civil War society. In short, not onl…

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Walking Dead and Zombie Ethics, or “Don’t Fight the Zombies. You Can’t Win”

…le: these monsters are a five billion dollar industry. They appear in cell phone ads for Sprint, they chase runners in 5Ks, and they scare crowds at haunted houses and theme parks. With The Walking Dead and World War Z, zombies cemented their reign as the favored monster of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.   The zombie’s ubiquity begs for explanation, and there is no shortage of theories. David Denby, writing about World War Z …

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“Even the Rich Suffer”: An Interview with Google’s Jolly Good Fellow Chade-Meng Tan

…y still doubles as his nickname: Jolly Good Fellow. Over the course of two phone conversations, RD asked Tan—who was, in fact, quite jolly—if mindfulness is a watering-down of Buddhism, whether meditation can truly save the world, and why he specializes in teaching rich people. You’re one of the only prominent advocates of secular mindfulness who is not white. What’s that like? Not only am I one of the only non-white people, but I’m one of the ver…

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Mitt, the Marriotts, and Porn

…ernet technological and capacity innovation before the advent of the smart phone.   And if we want to start a serious conversation about where presidential candidates get their money and how ethical that money is, let’s do it. I have a laundry list of labor, environmental, feminist, and human rights issues with multinational corporations I’d love to start working through. But don’t give me a thin, opportunistic connect-the-Mormon-dots story and pr…

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Departure of the Queen

…tch 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 reflective read. Coming to the end of the Qur’an reading is also melancholy, and I forget why I felt I shou…

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This Narrative of Death that is So Powerful Among Us

…rscript speech that kicked off this whole project, about that kind of partisan wrangling, those arguments we carry on with one another. What role does partisan engagement have for Christians? Walter: We are inevitably strong advocates for what we think is right. What I’ve said in several places is that it is foolish for liberal Christians and conservative Christians to spend all of their energy against each other because the real challenge and the…

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Why We Can’t Afford to “Wait And See” How Trump Dismantles LGBT Rights

…tic to oppose LGBT equality, as Salon explains. Just three years ago, on a phone call with faith leaders supporting the Tea Party movement, Price agreed that there are “consequences of activity that has been seen as outside the norm,” suggesting that increased health care costs for LGBT people are a result of some abnormal activity. (Yes, that’s code for anal sex. Or gender-affirming surgeries. Or marrying the person you love most in the world, if…

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What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?

…rs—but religion is doubtless part of the story. You can’t kill tens of thousands and rape thousands on the basis of their religion, and claim religion has nothing to do with it. One does not slaughter a people until one has hated them sufficiently to go from seeing them as individuals to seeing them as a mass to be done away with. And that hate is Islamophobia. Fears of “creeping Shari’ah”—the manufactured fear Islamophobes haunt America with, too…

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How (and Why) A Determined Sit-In Worked

…’ offices pretty much go directly in the trash. They pay more attention to phone calls and letters, but street protests don’t bother them at all, unless they’re on cable news, which they almost never are. Hashtags? Changing your Twitter avatar? Forget about it. Popular protest does play a supporting role in getting us to a point where something like the Congressional sit-in works. So do the organizations—including the religious groups—who sponsor…

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