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Memo to David Brooks: Francis Is Not Naïve For Criticizing Capitalism

By Peter Laarman

…credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign energy sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or perhap…

Celebrate Jesus with Weird Merchandise!

By Gwynne Watkins

…er, and the church-service version. Merchandisers are wise to define Easter by marshmallow chicks and colorful baskets, rather than bring theology into it. But there are always exceptions. One is the Oriental Trading Company. Founded to create cheap plastic toys for carnivals, OTC is now a leading supplier of cheap plastic stuff for church groups and Christian schools. Their party supply catalog always contains a small section dedicated to Jesus m…

How Not to Support Obamacare

By Peter Laarman

…ttle-discussed provision of the ACA, hospitals that serve disproportionate numbers of the urban poor are losing their subsidies. But for Obama not to stand his ground and say that the cheap, low-level policies that many healthy people now have should be cancelled for the sake of the common good: that’s just inexcusable. On the other hand, he’s not getting a lot of help from his Democratic “friends” on this one, and for the same reason: They likewi…

NC’s Gay Marriage Ban: “It’s Going to Hurt the Church”

By Nicole Greenfield

…r Equality and Pastors Against Amendment One, Knight points out that conservative churches far outnumber progressive ones in North Carolina. “They’re encouraging their folks to vote as much as we are,” he said. “It remains to be seen who’s going to be motivated and mobilized to get out there and do it.” As far as media coverage is concerned, Bakker laments that the same-old anti-gay Christian perspective is still the easy go-to. “It’s a strange ph…

Hookers for Jesus: Sex and Salvation on the Strip

By Nicole Greenfield

…lical concern for more than a decade. Led by Michael Horowitz, a neo-conservative scholar at the Hudson Institute, a coalition of evangelicals including Chuck Colson (joined improbably by a group of feminists who had already been championing the cause) pushed for legislation that would eventually become the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000. While these proponents fought in vain for a broad definition of trafficking that would incl…

Are American Christians “Persecuted”?

By Eric C. Miller

…hey don’t have it as bad as gays in ISIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed. At Patheos, Benjamin Corey shakes that cheap argument awake: Can we stop complaining about this bogus idea that American Christians are persecuted now? I mean, really. Can we stop? The world needs us to turn from ourselves and focus on this real persecution, because it’s evil and must be exposed and stopped. However, our own self-centeredness as Ameri…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…s of history, he was no less a harbinger of the Holy Spirit. The religious valence of Hegel’s political thought was precisely what made his vision so magisterial and so attractive to a society eager to square Christianity with Enlightenment values. The Prussian elite adopted this religioscientific philosophy to secure their own rational and divine right to rule and fight. Seeking their overthrow, after all, Hegel’s most influential disciple wrote…

Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

By Arthur Waskow

…tian radical A. J. Muste calling Moses the organizer of “Brickmakers Union Number 1” and a pacifist Russian rabbi named Tamaret—wove them all into a new Telling of the tale of freedom. In that Telling, the then ongoing, even now unfinished, struggle of Black America for freedom was interwoven with the ancient story of the Israelites’ struggle to end their slavery under Pharaoh. Where the old Haggadah had what seemed to me a silly argument about ho…

Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

By Nick Street

…e—which is itself a reflection of a larger and increasingly obdurate conservative movement in opposition to advancing queer rights—are the core memes of intolerance that the Soulforce contingent has come to Conway to disrupt. “I’m someone who knows what it feels like to be rejected by his family on the basis of doctrine,” says Jarrett Lucas, the other co-director of this season’s Equality Ride. Lucas, 22, was raised a Jehovah’s Witness by his gran…

Too Hot for Shul: Rabbis Seek Healthy Israel Dialogue After Gaza

By Sarah Posner

…Rosen, who for 17 years led the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Illinois, recently stepped down from his pulpit, following a summer of protest against the Gaza war with the left-wing Jewish Voice for Peace, on whose Rabbinical Council he serves. (Compared to J Street’s 800-plus-member Rabbinic Cabinet, JVP’s two-year-old Rabbinic Council has just 50.) Rosen told me he was not forced out, but that his decision to step down was d…