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Gay Suicide and the Ethic of Love: A Progressive Christian Response

By Eric Reitan

…identity. On the contrary, the vote became an occasion for those with the most hateful views to be handed a microphone and afforded the chance to tell the community just how sick, sinful, perverted, and disgusting their gay and lesbian neighbors are. According to the Tulsa World report, Harrington’s father “said he feels his son may have glimpsed a hard reality at the Sept. 28 council meeting, a place where the same sentiments that quietly tormen…

Missouri Pastor Goes Viral on Gawker: ‘Separation of Church and Hate’

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…Springfield. It was actually one of the easier speeches I’ve ever written, mostly because so much of it was quoted material. After all of this started going viral, I was especially taken aback when a friend of mine informed me that one of the more popular quotes I used was actually related to slavery, not segregation, which of course drives the point home all the more. Walk me through how you came to the convictions you hold: your religious convic…

Ricky Gervais: Why I’m an Atheist

By Lauri Lebo

…ly clicked on it. I was surprised when I saw this wasn’t a clip of his latest hysterical stand up, but an essay he penned for the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog. The topic of his essay was how he came to be an atheist. The whole piece is here. While there is humor in the piece, it’s actually more of a sweet thoughtful response to all the people who ask him and other atheists why they don’t believe in God. And as my husband noticed, Gervais i…

A Valentine for the World…and for the Church I Left

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…reaker Here’s a little story. When my ex-husband and I became Christians almo*]}*st forty years ago, we were ecstatically happy and in love with each other, other Christians, sinners, you name it. He was overjoyed to find another Christian at work. This man, however, was reluctant to accept my ex-husband as a TRUE believer. He made a checklist and asked my ex to agree or disagree with specific creeds: Trinity? Check. Unlimited atonement? Check. Persev…

Why is Liberty Institute Still Defending Phillip Monk?

By Rob Shryock

…(Monk had lied) but did not punish him, I figured Monk’s defenders would just stop caring, since the story no longer fit their worldview. I was very, very wrong. The Liberty Institute, which represents Monk legally, is doubling down. After the release of the Air Force investigation, they produced two documents which show that Monk’s transfer date was moved from September 30th to August 14th. The Liberty Institute believes that, This documentation…

Facebook, Twitter, and the Death of Body Language

By Anthony B. Pinn

…ng that technology comes with a price, and this price has something of a postmodern twist. By this I mean that tweeting and other high-tech modalities of exchange send information about happenings, attitudes, feelings, and events—but in a way that disconnects life moments from bodies. We, through our dependency on quick pieces of information, are dispersed and outside our bodies. Life developments become confined to the written word (often in shor…

Obama’s Muslim Strategy 2.0

By Haroon Moghul

…ct determinant, but they’re better than any other determinant we have. The most important consequence? Because America has Muslims, America is a Muslim-minority nation. That means America is as much a part of a global Muslim conversation as any other society. But that’s not the greatest change Obama has indicated. Through the president’s strategy, America has given herself the right to participate in Islamic conversations. America, a Muslim-minori…

Why It’s Heresy to Read the Bible Literally: An Interview with John Shelby Spong

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…us as this so people know you can’t read the story literally. What did you most enjoy about writing this book? The most fun I had in the first part of the book was developing the characters that Matthew puts into the genealogy—the tainted women. That’s not an accident. Nobody reads the genealogy. That’s the most boring part of the Bible and yet the clue to the virgin birth is in that story. God can raise up holiness out of any human distortion is…

“Reason to Worry”: An Anti-Semitism Scholar Opens Up on Trump, Misogyny and the Future of Anti-Judaism

By Michael Schulson

…is a way in which thinking about Israel is a way of thinking about what is most in need of perfection in the world. We should probably worry more about something like these tweets because we’re in a space in which the use of anti-Judaism as a way of fantasizing the perfection of the world is already becoming very powerful. What’s the connection between anti-Jewish politics and utopian politics? It depends on what you mean by utopian, but I think i…

Lessons Learned this Ramadan

By Amina Wadud

…the community around my shaykh (whom I have known for 8 or 9 years), with most of them American converts about my age and level of education, and the worship was sweeter. Go figure. Family matters. I did take a few days off from the intensified worship just to be with my family who lives farther away from me. Still, we fasted and prayed and ate together and that too was a reminder of what is good and meaningful in life. It brought me to that plac…