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

By Michael Schulson

…ane, set of ritual practices, communal obligations, legal traditions, and philosophical arguments. For Jewish communities of all kinds and levels of observance, part of practice is reckoning with that (often inconvenient) context. And even when given a modern spin, the sabbath tradition can be harnessed toward more radical ends. The great 20th century rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel explicitly presented Shabbat as a critique of industrial civilizatio…

Gay Marriage Bill Totalitarian Says Head Bishop

By Peter Montgomery

…ing increasingly shrill in his efforts to stop the shift toward equality. This week, on his official blog, he wrote: “Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America—not in China or North Korea. In those countries, government presumes daily to ‘redefine’ rights, relationships, values, and natural law. There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who di…

Star Trek: Politics Anti-Matters

By Nathan Schneider

…the first Next Generation movie, Generations, Data plugged in an emotion chip, which goes in and out through successive films. His adventures became a tango with sensual concupiscence. Gradually Spock, too, became unhinged. It began after his death in The Wrath of Khan and rebirth in The Search for Spock. More and more, he picked up loopholes in logic that allowed for a bit of lying, a bit of illogical hope, and even enough religion to hang a Mar…

ACLU and Thomas More Law Center Rush to Terry Jones Defense

By Lauri Lebo

…e, ridicule, pity — any of these would’ve been an appropriate response to this fool. Arguing him down outside the center would’ve been fine, too, for the more passionate among us. But throwing the man in jail truly risks turning a gasbag into a poster boy for the fight against governmental assaults on free speech. What’s more, it’ll only make it easier for Jones to further fuel misperceptions of Muslims as intolerant of criticism, misperceptions…

White House Position
on Exemption from Contraception Coverage
“Not a Done Deal”?

By Sarah Posner

…ports 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 reform, or that it conveyed s…

Meet the “New Age” Stephen Colbert

By Andrew Aghapour

…. Part of the human condition is we become very attached to practices and philosophies that work well for us. And when those practices and philosophies have reached their expiration date, we’re still attached to them. The Ultra Spiritual video series is an invitation to go beyond the beliefs that have worked well for us as soon as they’ve stopped working well. You have a knee injury, break your leg, your crutch is going to help you really well for…

U.S. Religious Right Groups Support Move Toward ‘Illiberalism’ of Hungary and Poland; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…om Cairo and New York respectively, who know the Egyptian situation well. While this panic might seem like an outbreak of collective insanity, our experiences—and recent history—confirm it’s not. Egypt’s persecution of LGBTQ people is a calculated strategy. (It imitates an equally political campaign against gays launched in 2001 by the Mubarak dictatorship, this time on a vaster scale.) The only incomprehensible thing is how Western governments, a…

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

By Chip Berlet

…ght-wing populists into an armed insurrection. Timothy McVeigh failed to achieve his goal, but 168 people died in the process. On January 19, the people of Massachusetts elected a conservative Republican backed by the Tea Party movement, Scott Brown, to the Senate seat held by the late Ted Kennedy. Scott will try to shift the right-wing populists back into an alliance with the Republican Party, which itself is already moving to the political right…

Confessions of a Hater

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…e root. After that, he stayed more often after class, one day whipping out his phone to show me a photo of a white supremacist leader standing up in a convertible during what was obviously a white pride parade. The red-faced, fist waving man in the picture was flanked by two little girls sitting in the back seat, arms crossed with very pronounced frowns on their faces. “They don’t look all that happy,” I remarked to my student. “Those are my daugh…

UNESCO on Religion, Culture and SOGI in Asia; Orthodox Family Sues to Stop Cremation of Israeli Trans Woman; Struggles of Iraqi Queer Activists; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…r of the country’s only organization for its queer community.” Amir left behind his home and family a year ago and is currently living in Sweden. There, he hopes to register and expand his charity IraQueer, as it is illegal to do so in Iraq. He has received multiple threats from both officials and his friends because of who he is and the work he does. “It’s incredibly difficult being away from my family – I’ve been missing birthdays, everything –…