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American Missionary Could Face Genocide Charges, But Brazil’s Indigenous Communities Have a Bigger Problem

By Amy Fallas

…n our sacred land, like any person on Earth.” Complicating this dynamic is American missionaries’ own fraught history with indigenous groups, corporate interests, foreign governments, and local officials in the Amazon. Researchers Gerald Colby and Carlotte Dennett demonstrate how the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), and its sister organization the Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT), spread throughout the Amazon basin during the mid twentieth c…

A Twisted Love Story: How American Evangelicals Helped Make Putin’s Russia and How Russia Became the Darling of the American Right

By Katherine Kelaidis

…the more extreme. Among the less extreme consequences was that the rising number of conservative American Christians who identified as Orthodox started to soften opinions and change American rightwing perceptions of Russia. Arguably, what this influx of American evangelicals into American Orthodox churches did was create a bridge over which American evangelicals in Russia were able to cross. An alliance began to take root which shaped Russia and…

Workers Once Forced the Social Gospel Into Churches—Can It Happen Again?

By Eric C. Miller

…ments with deep suspicion and, in many cases, outright alarm. There were a number of reasons for this. Protestant ministers enjoyed close ties—social, political, financial, and more—to Chicago’s industrial elite, which predisposed them to be skeptical of trade unionism. In the turbulent 1870s and 1880s, as the rank and file, increasingly predominated by the foreign born, repeatedly took its protest to the streets, Protestant leaders called for vio…

A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

…onal ministers, associates in ministry, and deaconesses, and currently the number of women and men preparing for ministry in ELCA seminaries is roughly equal (Susan Candea, “Wisdom Has Blessed Us”). While there are certainly some in the ELCA who continue to oppose women’s ordination, those numbers are small and grow smaller with each passing year. The same, I suspect, will be the case for the issue of gay and lesbian ordination forty years from no…

Tribal Trouble: The Changing Nature of American Jews’ Relationship to Israel and the Question of Jewish Unity

By Shaul Magid

…reements about matters concerning Israel. We can point to the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism; the non-statist American Zionists, such as rabbis Abba Hillel Silver and Stephen Wise (who only agreed to join Ben-Gurion’s statist project after the Biltmore Conference in May, 1942); and the anti-occupation group Breira that emerged after the Yom Kippur War in 1973; among many others. The new heresy The identification of Zionism with Jewishne…

Spiritual Unplugging, Or What to Do When There is Wifi at the Ashram

By Matt Hamilton

…of a priest felt right. I wanted to make the priest’s total commitment to service, especially a service so rooted in wisdom, social justice, and peace. That this commitment entailed celibacy didn’t seem to matter—it was a sacrifice, after all. The vows only legitimated my deeper desire. Until I had a chance to live it out. Something about the politics of living in community coupled with the nobility of the cause—the work of God! – put a sour tast…

A ‘Pro-Life’ Buttigieg Ambush, Trump’s Corrupt Counsel, and More

By Daniel Schultz

…the large evangelical charity Samaritan’s Purse—has never been as grifty a customer as Sekulow. But he’s been no less a culture warrior for conservative evangelicals, and no less a stout defender of Pres. Trump. This does not sit well with everyone: The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is looking for venues in London and Liverpool for Franklin Graham’s upcoming UK tour. Management of ACC Liverpool said Jan. 24 that it was dropping plans to ho…

Trump’s Inaugural Address Gets an “F” in American Civil Religion

By Spencer Dew

…elation of sovereignty to power, citizens to the state, that characterizes American politics. Sovereignty, in American politics, is rooted in the people. Rather than resting in a monarch, American popular sovereignty is a matter of negotiation and compromise, a matter of relation. Not only does such popular sovereignty not look much like the old-school, European variety—which gets shorthanded as “tyranny” in our founding documents—it is also an id…

Wal-Mart Faces a New Round of Historic Strikes… But Why Now?

By Sarah Jaffe

…ingly immigrants and people of color. Catholic churches with ties to Latin American progressive traditions, African-American Protestant churches with roots in the Civil Rights movement and white Protestant churches in the social gospel tradition bring a very different standard for what it means to care for the community. While he was working with OUR Wal-Mart in California, Jones met a young Latina woman, a Wal-Mart employee, who was pregnant. The…

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

By Ilana E. Strauss

…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…