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Texas Woman Opposes Divorce Citing ‘Blood Covenant’; Will Anti-Sharia Law Get in the Way?

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…k in 2011: [Shari’ah] is really a lot like the Tao, or like Zen. It is the way, but not in a road-map-with-specific-details kind of way. It is not a long list of dos and don’ts. It is an idea that there is harmony in all of creation, including human creatures, our communities, and our relationships with each other, with the rest of creation, and with the Creator. It is also about doing that which will maintain that harmony. It is an ideal. Neverth…

What if Israel Were in Germany? An Alternate History

By Haroon Moghul

…t else would you expect? Except, of course, that it didn’t have to be that way at all—and probably won’t be that way, tomorrow. As to power, the main thing I’d say about that is that in the long run it tends to change hands. And while there are nicer reasons to cultivate an ethic of mercy and fairness, one of the most important ones is: Your turn on the bottom could be next. Maybe this isn’t the kind of question you, as an author, would like to ge…

The Sacred and the Dead: It’s (Not) Just a Box of Rain

By Cathleen Falsani

…dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago Walk out of any doorway feel your way, feel your way like the day before Maybe you’ll find direction around some corner where it’s been waiting to meet you ~ from “Box of Rain” “The Grateful Dead were more than just a band. They were their own planet, populated by millions of devoted fans.” – Martin Scorsese The Grateful Dead’s music has, for half a century now, provided a virtual “third place” for fans tha…

I Don’t Want a “Plutonic” Relationship

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…on of a context in which grace can abound.” For the church to stand in the way of such relationships, straight or gay, is to stand in the way of God’s grace. This is the message I wish each David that writes to me could understand. Yes, fornication is wrong – but fornication is sex outside of a commitment, whether it’s marriage or not. When people like David write to tell me that my partner and I cannot fully express the grace of our bodies simply…

Tribal Trouble: The Changing Nature of American Jews’ Relationship to Israel and the Question of Jewish Unity

By Shaul Magid

…and knowing the reader can fill in the blank space in-between) is a common way communities struggle to come to terms with things they have less control over by talking about things that they ostensibly have more control over. The fear of intermarriage for many American Jews may really be a fear of assimilation, but assimilation is such a deeply rooted dimension of the American Jewish experience, so difficult to locate, much less control, and such…

Václav Havel: Democracy as Spiritual Discipline

By Peter Montgomery

…m aware that, in everyday politics, that is not seen as the most practical way of going about it…. I see the only way forward in that old, familiar injunction; “live in truth.” But Havel was not naïve about the need for eternal vigilance. If I talk here about my political — or more precisely, my civil — program, about my notion of the kind of politics and values and ideals I wish to struggle for, this is not to say that I am entertaining the naïve…

Synod or Sin Oddly: Vatican Encourages Catholics to ‘Walk Together’ as Long as the Hierarchy Leads the Way and Decides the Route

By Mary E. Hunt

…k on walking,” or “a meeting on meetings.” The fuzzy factor is a dead giveaway to an unthought out idea. No one I know has actually read the Preparatory Document, For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, Mission,” much less the VADEMECUM, or Handbook, that serves as the how-to guide. Something about the bright colors and whimsical drawings in these documents—the graphics of the little children leading the way are too cute by half. It gives…

The Bible Says… and Other Myths About Scripture

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…an make the twentieth century seem uncannily akin to the sixteenth in many ways: here, as then, new translations again paved the way for other, more material, forms of scriptural refashioning. That is the central thesis of this important book. The question implicit in that thesis is this: What will become of the Book, and of the Christian religion, in our time? Answering that question requires the skills of a masterful historian, religious fluency…

Sisterhood is Islamic: an Interview with Daisy Khan

By Rene Rosechild

…struck a woman; in fact he was very respectful to women. He always walked away. So number one, there is no prophetic precedent. So again, that’s a point where scholarship is going to help. And that is where great minds can come in and say, “What does this really mean?” and Laleh Bakhtiar, a Saudi scholar, has gone through the entire Qur’an in analysis and said that daraba has several meanings: yes, one of them is “beat,” but it has also been trans…

Cherry-Picking in the God Gap: A Post-Election Conversation on the Religious Vote and the Battle to Spin it

By Daniel Schultz and Chrissy Stroop

…t doesn’t challenge the status quo. And I think it’s important to consider ways that we might push to change the national conversation in ways that would challenge the status quo. Even the cottage industry of head-scratching, quasi-critical punditry on white evangelicals that developed during the Trump years failed to do that, largely because it remained fixated on the concept of hypocrisy and failed to include ex-evangelical perspectives. And alr…