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

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…e, this heart, this desire for all things good and lovely and of excellent repute. But I don’t want to quibble. Even though we’re very, very good at quibbling and quoting chapter and verse, can I just say again—I like you. Do you like me? I have known hundreds of believers and only two have contacted me in the years since I’ve been gone. (D.L. and L.W.) Each contacted me after reading my book. They expressed pain at my departure, and they told me…

Why is Liberty Institute Still Defending Phillip Monk?

By Rob Shryock

…ick a case that’s a little more clear-cut? Just days after the Air Force’s report was released, Monk openly appeared (in possible violation of military code) at the Values Voters Summit for a panel. The Liberty Institute’s Jeff Mateer put his hand on Monk’s shoulder and praised him, saying, “We’ve gotten phone calls from military members who are undergoing discrimination…and with the exception of him, those folks that have called us have all wante…

Facebook, Twitter, and the Death of Body Language

By Anthony B. Pinn

…I’m not trading in my TREO, and I’m not canceling the media package on my phone or reducing the number of messages I sent through that magical device. I am not calling for a technology purge. I’m simply noting 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…

Obama’s Muslim Strategy 2.0

By Haroon Moghul

…ether, they finish what globalization started: the end of a purely or even dominantly territorial conception of the Islamic world, a challenge which Muslim thinkers are as of yet insufficiently prepared for. (See how ungracefully Iran’s Islamic Revolution has aged.) Islam is more mobile than ever before, and unfortunately violent extremists recognized this, emerging from such contexts and capitalizing on them, long before our government understood…

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

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…s proclaims these are the things that are happening and this means the Kingdom of God is coming in, then John the Baptist can still be the forerunner announcing that the Kingdom of God is at hand. That’s why Matthew is 40% longer than Mark because he goes through the whole year. That’s the first clue I received from my mentor Michael Gouder who saw that Mark wrote his gospel with Jesus stories to carry the community from Rosh Hashanah to Passover,…

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

By Michael Schulson

…s amount to the equivalent of however many billion sightings. I think that number was inflated. But it doesn’t matter much. What’s the difference between ten billion views and, say, one billion views? It’s all bad. It’s just this question of magnitude. It’s a little bit like you’ve seen the tip of the iceberg, and someone tells “You know, 90% of it is underneath.” I had a similar experience when I was working on my first book, Communities of Viole…

Lessons Learned this Ramadan

By Amina Wadud

…ends said hajj would be a challenge because of gender restrictions. Then a friend described people doing tawaf, or circumambulation around the kaaba, while sending text messages on a mobile phone. I just cannot see totally giving up my one-on-one moments with Allah just for a blog. That being said, let the preparations to meet the king begin….

Confessions of a Hater

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…t on par with other famous haters—like Westboro Baptist’s Fred Phelps, who reportedly lies near death in a Topeka, Kansas, hospice after being excommunicated from the church he founded in 1955. But I remain a hater. The student who asked me this question had revealed a lot about himself the first day he wheeled into class. He was what we community college types call a “non-traditional student,” an older, grizzled, white-bearded Vietnam veteran in…

From A Belize Jungle, A Look At Creationist “Outreach” in Vancouver

By Lauri Lebo

…eteorite? Bomb? End of the world? We were freaked out. No television, cell phone, internet service. There was no way to find out what happened. Later that night, in the Mayan village, the men gathered outside our hut, talking about it in hushed voices. Lacking any better answers, my husband offered the theory that perhaps it was from aliens. We learned the source of the explosion the next morning. At 8:59, the space shuttle, taking a detour due to…

Looking For Answers at the Oscars: A Guide to This Year’s Contenders

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…etimes communication technologies facilitated that friendship (a letter, a phone call). In the new age the structure is reversed as friendships are built upon those very communication technologies. We are now databases, plugged into a network. Face-to-face friendships have become interface friendships. A more ethereal ethernet was evoked in Inception. Here too people are linked to each other through a social network, and here too identities are…