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Why Kaepernick’s Refusal to Stand Is an Act of Religious Dissent

…ervescence,” could lead individuals to act with emotional abandon, what we today might call extremism. To threaten the totem, particularly in front of large groups (such as on national television!), is to call into question the foundations of society. “When a belief is shared unanimously by a people, to touch it—that is, to deny or question it—is forbidden,” Durkheim wrote. People kill or die for their symbols: The soldier who dies for his flag di…

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Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

…was not at all good. The Jews who first conceived of heaven as we know it today were under assault, literally, from their Greek rulers. Christians, at the beginning, were a marginal band, derided by the pagan majority. Islam was established in a uniquely inhospitable part of the world by people who hoped to rectify the social order: to turn the “have nots” into “haves.” For all these groups, heaven—a very specific heaven—was a reward for staying…

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Christian Nationalism Was the Loser of Tuesday’s Debate

…st night’s otherwise circus-like debate. I’ll come back to what I do mean. Today’s authoritarian GOP is the party of white Christians and those who are willing to support an extreme Christian nationalist agenda. Today’s Democratic Party has thus become the party of literally everyone else who chooses to affiliate with one of the major parties in our broken two-party system. This situation makes for a messy coalition, but it also provides Democrats…

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Top Five Toxic Religion Stories of 2014

…crats hew to the commonwealth ideal. The most intense ideological conflict today isn’t between Democrats and Republicans but between Warren Democrats who want to resist wealth’s domination and Clintonistas who are quite comfortable with the way things are trending. The related religiously-rooted rift in national politics is between leaders who still pledge their allegiance to the old “redeemer nation” idea and those in both parties (e.g., Rand Pau…

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Dilemmas of American Empire: Can Obama Pull Off a Game-Changer in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan?

…Natanz with a nuclear weapon until the Joint Chiefs rebelled against them. Today there is a serious possibility that the Netanyahu government in Israel will carry out the bombing option. If it does, the entire region could explode into a ball of fire. That’s the apocalyptic scenario. The hopeful one is a game-changer based on two or three years of sustained diplomacy. The U.S. could declare that it recognizes the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic…

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More Pressure on Obama to Fix His Religious Freedom Legacy

…Vision Memo, has thus attracted a larger coalition. Organizations signing today’s letter include Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union, a number of Christian Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, secular, and atheist groups, as well as legal advocates, abortion rights advocates, and LGBT groups. According to the letter, the World Vision Memo is based “on flawed legal analysis and wrongly asserts that R…

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Rallies Honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s Support of Organized Labor

…ckelberry was one of the men who marched alongside King during the strike. Today, Mr. Nickelberry, 79, is still hauling Memphis’ garbage, as he has done for more than 55 years. I wrote about Nickelberry in September: Like his fellow sanitation workers back then, he heaved rusted cans over his head. Wet garbage and maggots leaked down his collar and the back of his shirt. There of riding the bus home and people complaining that he smelled because t…

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Pious White Reformers and Race, Then and Now

…Jedidiah Morse, Jeremiah Evarts, Robert Finley, and Isaac McCoy. We speak today of the fecklessness of white liberals, and I certainly am among those who have decried, in these pages and elsewhere, the special fecklessness of white Christian progressives when it comes to the hardcore issues of race and class. The difference between today’s progressives and the “benevolent” reformers of 200 years ago is that those pious reformers actually had the…

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Same-Sex Marriage May Lead to Polygamy, But So What?

…ess to divorce and suffrage. While the stakes are not exactly the same for today’s debates over polygamy, there’s quite a bit of rhetorical and political continuity between the nineteenth-century anti-polygamy cause and today’s. Claims that same-sex marriage and polygamy are social experiments that will adversely affect children serve to limit women’s (and other people’s) options. Sheff discovered, for instance, that triads with one woman and two…

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Old Politics, New Bedfellows: The Olson/Boies Challenge to Prop. 8

…rganizing and firepower that progressives will need to defeat conservatism today. To be sure, there are cleavages within the conservative movement. Some cultural conservatives are willing to support contraception and comprehensive sex-ed in the name of reducing the need for abortion. Some hawks who supported the Iraq war nevertheless oppose torture and executive secrecy. And many fiscal conservatives are as disgusted with the lack of transparency…

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