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From Organized Religion to Organizing Religion: Brian D. McLaren Wants Christians to Be Better

By Peter Laarman

…e end, is up to us in creatively seizing opportunities. I’ll keep doing my best to do so, in the company of many others. Of course I think your theological section is exactly on point, but I’m reminded of how many people I’ve known who go to church precisely because of their attraction to the idea of God as an all-powerful king with zero tolerance for sin and sinners. How to you respond, pastorally, to people who say that you are reducing God to m…

How to Meet Muslims: A (Cinematic) Primer

By Haroon Moghul

…d in the village, sad attempts to forget historic violence and move on, as best as possible. We see in this unsettling film the true cost of extremism, and the ways in which it has undermined, cruelly and uniquely, the religious culture of the societies it does not spring from so much as it consumes from within. If I have a quarrel with the film, it is the suggestion that such extremism can be blamed solely on the 1980s dictatorship of Gen. Zia u…

Trump’s Magical Appeal: A Dated Anthropologist Offers Clues

By Elijah Siegler

…rank and authority of a chief or king,” he wrote in The Golden Bough, the best of them “perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother and to play on his superstition for their own advantage. Not that the sorcerer is always a knave and impostor; he is often sincerely convinced that he really possesses those wonderful powers which the credulity of his fellows ascribes to him.” The savviest magician-king, in other words, tells the people what…

Bibi’s Megillah to Obama

By Sarah Posner

…0 copies. It had occupied the No. 1 position on the Wal-Mart inspirational best-seller list, showed up on Wal-Mart’s list of top 10 best sellers for seven weeks, and made the USA Today top 50 best-seller list for six weeks. * * * * Esther is a favorite Old Testament figure of many evangelicals, a heroine who saved her people from a genocidal plot masterminded by the evil vizier Haman through her influence as the wife of the King of Persia. When sh…

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Jihadis?

By Haroon Moghul

…k Hirsi Ali is deliberately misrepresenting Islam. I think she’s doing the best she can. In her insistence that secular analysis must not be applied to Islam, that somehow the religion must be kept immune from reasonable and rational discussion, Ayaan Hirsi Ali most closely resembles the Muslims she claims use cell phones while shunning the worldview behind them. You could say that she’s undergone a schism, but that’s all. Islam needs a Reformatio…

Finding Love—and Dogma—in Unexpected Places: Jeff Chu’s Gay Christian Odyssey

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…rable, messy selves? The church is where you dress up and wear your Sunday best. That sometimes precludes being real. Did you find any of your expectations easily confirmed? What surprised me the least is how dogmatic people can be on all points of the theological spectrum. It was disappointing, but it wasn’t surprising, to hear Fred Phelps be dogmatic. It was disappointing but not surprising to hear people in the Metropolitan Community Church be…

The Mother of Christian Feminist Ethics, Beverly Wildung Harrison: 1932–2012

By Mark Hulsether

…cs.” Eventually her students helped her collect these essays in one of the best books ever published in feminist religious thought, Making the Connections. Many chapters from these books warrant book-length treatment, but she published just one such monograph: Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion. Although Bev’s interests ranged widely, this book is a good example of how she taught her students to frame issues—to think concretely ab…

5 Key Moments From the Year of the ‘Exvangelicals’

By Chrissy Stroop

…ing the country on The Unapologetics Tour, in connection with which they visited sites important to evangelical history and subculture, interviewed numerous exvangelicals, and held book readings and events related to the launch of journalist and novelist Hesse’s second novel, Carnality: Sebastian Phoenix and the Dark Star. One of these events took place at City Lit Books in Chicago on Friday, October 12. The well attended event, audio of which is…

Netanyahu’s (Republican) Esther Moment

By Sarah Posner

…0 copies. It had occupied the No. 1 position on the Wal-Mart inspirational best-seller list, showed up on Wal-Mart’s list of top 10 best sellers for seven weeks, and made the USA Today top 50 best-seller list for six weeks. Hagee, who serves as head pastor of the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, hosts his own television program that is seen twice a day on TBN. He argues that the United States must join Israel in a pre-emptiv…

Celebrating Religious Freedom Day By Taking Back the Revolutionary Meaning of ‘Religious Freedom’

By Frederick Clarkson

…eye on the present and plan to ensure our rights for future generations as best we can. All sides sometimes conflate religion or “faith” with religious freedom. But religious freedom according to the Virginia Statute and the First Amendment is not about religion. Religious freedom is about the right to believe as you will. Much like the right to vote is not the same as voting. I think we can learn to better connect the right to religious freedom w…