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What To Do When Fred Phelps Arrives in Your Neighborhood

By Susan Henking

…ive. Yet, fantasy picketing in my imagination allows those of us who favor free speech (even free horrifying speech—remember Skokie and the Nazis) to express our outrage without giving up our commitment to free speech and, indeed, to express our outrage without being as offensive as those we find despicable. Not to mention avoiding the violence. And, of course, fantasy picketing gets around the many ways our culture has come to limit dissent in re…

Clergy May Soon Find Taxes Soaring As Result of an Under-the-Radar Ruling

By Patrick Hornbeck

…ndated that “In God We Trust” appear on U.S. currency. Neither required by free exercise, nor prohibited by establishment In the suit brought by the Freedom from Religion Foundation and several of its leaders, Judge Crabb ruled that the housing allowance exemption violates the First Amendment’s prohibition against the establishment of religion. Crabb had reached an identical conclusion at an earlier stage of the litigation, in 2013, but she was ov…

Milquetoast Liberal Religion Won’t Challenge Conservative Values: A History Lesson

By Sheila D. Collins

…back the country from the “radicals” who had been undermining faith in the free market. One of their targets for conversion was the country’s religious leadership. Using both the carrot (invitations to all-expenses paid weekend retreats where the values of laissez-faire were extolled) and the stick (the establishment of religious fronts like the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD) among others that targeted liberals and progressives in the…

Workers Once Forced the Social Gospel Into Churches—Can It Happen Again?

By Eric C. Miller

…way from a repeat of their late-nineteenth-century insurgency. There are a number of historical explanations for this. Certainly the Cold War baptism of “free enterprise” as a distinctively Christian way of doing business worked to erode social Christianity’s hold at the grassroots. The surging prosperity gospel of our own times has done further damage. All this being said, there are some favorable trends. The resources available to working people…

A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

…onal ministers, associates in ministry, and deaconesses, and currently the number of women and men preparing for ministry in ELCA seminaries is roughly equal (Susan Candea, “Wisdom Has Blessed Us”). While there are certainly some in the ELCA who continue to oppose women’s ordination, those numbers are small and grow smaller with each passing year. The same, I suspect, will be the case for the issue of gay and lesbian ordination forty years from no…

Broken Courts, Big Lies and Genocide Rehearsal: A Review of 2022—And What We Can Expect From 2023

By Annika Brockschmidt

…former President’s Mar-a-Lago residence, prompting bitter reactions from a number of Republicans, in some cases openly weighing political violence as a tool of reaction. Lindsey Graham predicted “riots in the streets,” should Trump be indicted, while Arizona Republican Andy Biggs and the Texas GOP compared the FBI raid to the crossing of “the Rubicon”—implying that a point of no return has been reached. The implications of the phrase are momentous…

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

By Ilana E. Strauss

…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…

Policing Academic Freedom: A Book, a Controversy, and the Ominous Aftermath

By Michael Jerryson

…that scholarly publishers in all countries should defend the principles of freedom of speech and academic freedom by all legal means. While Doniger was supported by the AAS, her body guards that escorted her around the conference reflected the continued presence of the polemic arena. Some of the negative reactions were openly hostile, whereas others were cloaked in political and legal rhetoric that echoed Mr. Batra’s suit. Prior to the conference,…

The March for Life: Grassroots Movement or Agitprop?

By Patricia Miller

…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…

Russian Attack on LGBTs at UN Rejected; Gay Cake Controversy Rages in N. Ireland; Bishop Calls for Marriage Referendum in Puerto Rico; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…reparative therapies that are either forced or coerced due to absence of a free and informed decision-making process, will be made illegal. Furthermore, citizens will not face any form of torture based on sexual orientation. Iran reiterates its commitment to protect those rights of recognized religious, ethnic and sexual minorities that are in accordance with its constitution, and conditions this statement on the fact that some may require amendme…