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In its Battle for ‘Life’ the Antiabortion Movement is Willing to Expose its Enemies to Death — And There’s an Old Christian Theology that Supports Them

By Beatrice Marovich

…hat life and death are enemies—in what is otherwise a secular frame of reference. Perhaps part of what it takes, to demilitarize reproductive politics in America today, includes the ability to raise questions about what seem like basic assumptions about the nature of life and death. And the ability to struggle against the logics (including the theologics) that seek to naturalize these assumptions….

Arab Spring: Countering the Naysayers

By Maryam Jamshidi

…do not unfold according to a set playbook. Indeed, revolutions are as much about changes on the micro level as they are about macro political shifts. On the way to creating better, more open governments and healthier economies, revolutions also transform individual expectations and perceptions about one’s local community and broader society—it is this sort of change that is currently taking root in various Arab Spring countries. A failure to appre…

What Role Should Religion Play in the Public Square? — A Black Christian and a Black Secular Humanist Debate and Discuss

By Brad R. Braxton and Anthony B. Pinn

…s should be welcomed into the public sphere to make their respective cases about their possible contributions to our collective well-being. I respect your opinion about permitting the practice of religion in individual and communal spheres, while “restricting” religion’s influence in the broader public sphere. However, within the guardrails of legal statutes about “religious freedom” (e.g., prohibiting religious practices that harm others), each r…

Donald Trump visits a black church. It goes about as well as you would expect.

By Daniel Schultz

…leaders have also suggested that Trump’s outreach to minorities is mostly about proving to undecided white voters that he’s not racist. That lines up with what Anthea Butler had to say. Who cares about planning for a visit to a black church when your only purpose in going is to convince white voters that you’re not a bigot, forty years of racist remarks and actions notwithstanding? God bless them, they’re trying. They couldn’t successfully bake a…

Worried About Inequality After the Pandemic? Start By Listening to the Women Ringing the Alarm for Decades

By Liz Theoharis

…could go on with this meeting”. Dr. King replied, “We don’t know anything about welfare. We are here to learn.” More than a month into the coronavirus pandemic, our nation is revealing how little it knows about welfare or how to care for all of its people. The $2 trillion stimulus package passed last week may include stop-gap measures for the poor, but it does very little to respond to the vast need being created by COVID-19 nor the pre-existing…

Is LGBT-Muslim Clash Aiding Rise of Right in Europe?

By Peter Montgomery

…I was afraid for my family in Libya because of the war, but I was worried about my situation too. It was the toughest human experience I ever lived.” Trinidad and Tobago: Activists debate wisdom of legal challenges versus hearts-and-minds efforts The Institute for War and Peace Reporting notes differing opinions among LGBT people about whether legal challenges or other strategies are the best way to move toward more acceptance. “The law doesn’t m…

Reza Aslan’s Missed Opportunity

By Micha'el Rosenberg

…have been more successful at unsettling the viewers comfortably-held views about who has the right to talk about what. Instead, he accepts Green’s assumption (an assumption likely held by some large segment of her viewers) that there is such a thing as objectivity, that some people have it and some do not, and therefore, that the only debate worth having is about whether my objectivity is bigger than yours. Ironically, Professor Aslan should appre…

Opposing Anti-Choice Legislation Isn’t a Violation of Religious Freedom, It’s an Expression of It

By Rebecca Todd Peters

…hat will contravene their faith’s most well-considered and cherished views about the major questions of life, reproduction, and freedom of religious conscience.” In other words, refusing to codify traditionalist, conservative religious beliefs into law isn’t a violation of anyone’s religious freedom. In fact, it not only protects a large majority of people in this country from the tyranny of patriarchy, it actually protects their religious freedom…

LGBT’s, Opponents Prep for Vatican Synod; UN Rights Council Adopts LGBT Resolution; Brazil’s Evangelicals Eye Presidency; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ans. These are our sisters and brothers who have discovered something true about themselves, and about their capacity for love, and know that what is true makes sense to them. And here is what is remarkable: this discovering of something that is true is working in exactly the way that the Gospel said it would, and following just the dynamic of the Spirit that flows upon us from Jesus. And yet bizarrely, Christian leaders of all denominations are j…

Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates: The Problem with Popularization

By Kathryn Lofton

…of readable biographies and Band of Brothers. These are good songs, songs about grandpa’s love of Civil War troop movements, songs about the democratic importance of an educated citizenry. Making complicated topics accessible has a noble tradition, a tradition inextricably bound to such lay groundswells as the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the civil rights movement. The global history of political change is also the history of history’s…