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The Sacred and the Dead: Three Ways to American Beauty

By Aaron K. Kerr

…n environment,’ which is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.” ~Music Promoter Bill Graham, April 29, 1971 One sentence, spoken by an anonymous “usher” to a maverick producer who then riffed to boisterous audience at the Fillmore East—all the words spoken then say more than any of us digitally-connected folk will be able to say. But as Bill Graham tells it, “you can use sentences and sentences,” so we might as well try. I nominate the Gratefu…

SCOTUS’s Incoherent ‘Masterpiece Cakeshop’ Decision

By Daniel Schultz

…to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to—to use their religion to hurt others. It’s simply a factual statement followed by an anodyne opinion. I don’t think people should use their religion to hurt others, either. Does that make me a bigot? The broader point here is that Kennedy’s reasoning is simply incoherent. There is no way for government to remain “strictly neutral” when it comes to religious values. B…

Enjoy the Kosher Collard Greens, But Understand This: Hebrew Israelites Have Something to Say to the Rest of the Jewish Community

By Andre E. Key, Walter Isaac, and Tamar Manasseh

…ary American religious landscape, the problematizing of Black spirituality promotes what we call “slave-shaming.” The phrase is in quotes because technically there’s no such thing as a “slave.” From antiquity the label of “slave” was used to designate people as “things” (i.e. the living property of another). But no human being is merely a thing; to call someone a “slave” was a way of denigrating their full humanity. On the societal level, this den…

The Far-Right Embrace of the Knights Templar isn’t Just About Faith, Tradition or History — It’s About Hate

By Thomas Lecaque

…so-called culture wars.” And this is where we can return to the far-right use of Templar imagery, because taken out of their Catholic context, the Templars have become a totem for the far-right and a way to vice-signal their anti-Muslim beliefs and conspiracies. In the United States, the imagery is rooted in the American reaction to 9/11, and especially in our 2003 invasion of Iraq, a war in which Christian supremacist rhetoric—including the infa…

Did the Pope Claim Gay Marriage as a Threat to Humanity or Didn’t He?

By Peter Montgomery

…humanity itself. Brown not only claims that the Pope didn’t specifically use the words “gay marriage,” he says that there wasn’t even the suggestion “that gay marriage was the most important of these [policies that threaten the family] and he didn’t mention it at all.” Really? Immediately following his naming of the family as the most important setting for the education of young people, the pope defines family as being “based on the marriage of…

Trump is a Nightmare, Sure, But Can He Actually Do Anything?

By Sunnivie Brydum

…call attention to things—that’s part of the strategy. In other words, you use everything you can use.” There’s no question that Trump has thus far leaned heavily on executive action to advance his policy goals—which is not uncommon for presidents faced with a divided (or, in this case, deeply dysfunctional) Congress. And while Trump has signed more executive orders to date than any president since Harry Truman, the actual policy impact of those o…

Way Beyond Atheism: God Does Not (Not) Exist

By Paul Wallace

…intelligence. Also, one may say that negative theology is content-free and useless because it nullifies the use of rational thought. In a sense this is a valid argument. But one can go beyond negative theology while bearing in mind its lessons. In fact, negative theology constitutes the central nervous system, if you will, of the entire Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas that Dawkins so happily and ignorantly mocks. In this work, Thomas employs an…

Of Personhood and the Pill: What’s at Stake?

By Atlee Parks Breland

…This even extends to contraception. Many pro-life people believe that the use of hormonal contraception and IUDs is incompatible with a view that life begins at conception, because of potential abortifacient effects. This view is by no means universal, but it’s common enough that it’s a fair question to ask whether personhood is incompatible with the Pill. If the pro-life movement can’t agree even amongst itself, how are women supposed to be able…

Will SB 1146 End LGBT Discrimination in California’s Religious Schools?

By Stephanie Russell-Kraft

…th-based institutions explicitly subject” to California non-discrimination codes. Of course, that’s because non-faith-based institutions are already subject to the state and federal anti-discrimination laws. “The targets of this bill are religious colleges and universities, but the true victims of this legislation would be the innocent students,” wrote California Assemblyman Matthew Harper early last month. Since the anti-discrimination requiremen…

Everything You Think You Know About the Dark Ages is Wrong

By Nancy Marie Brown

…r telling time and making measurements by the sun or stars. You could even use it to calculate the circumference of the earth, which Gerbert and his peers knew very well was not flat like a disc but round as an apple. Much of this science Gerbert learned as a youth living on the border of Islamic Spain, then an extraordinarily tolerant culture in which learning was prized. Born a peasant in the mountains of France in the mid-900s, Gerbert entered…