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Are Religious Leaders Prepared to Engage “Religious Liberty” Questions Post-Hobby Lobby?

By Carolyn Davis

…e. Religious leaders need to help their congregations tell the story of American religious freedom, both its successes and its failures. Celebrate the ways religious liberty provides the crucial bulwark that allows for pluralism of belief and experience: offer special worship services, sermons, education programs, and social media outreach efforts that critically engage the tensions between freedom and liberty in religious practice and American ci…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…rmation for both the self and beyond. I also think it is symptomatic of America’s puritanical heritage to attempt to strip away the festal or carnivalesque elements of religion from what some might consider to be “authentic” piety. But historically and cross-culturally, opportunities for celebration are often part of the “package deal” that religions offer. Another important aspect of Burning Man that often gets misunderstood is its critique of c…

A Match Made in Hell: Demons Have Become a Serious Force in US Politics — But We’ve Seen This Show Before

By Michael E. Heyes

…“End of Days” than “the End of Just Another Day.” I doubt it though. As Americans, we seem inextricably drawn to a rhetoric of the demonic at times of crisis, like moths to a flamethrower. In order to make good decisions at these crisis points, we need to take seriously that the belief in demons is a motivating factor in many peoples’ lives. And understanding this motivating factor is important, because, as it has so often in the past, belief in d…

Why Antisemitism is an Insufficient (and Risky) Explanation for Hamas’s October 7 Attack on Israel

By Shane Burley

…riod of violence, bigotry or persecution of Jews has such a different historical context that it’s nearly impossible to identify a unified, coherent, and transhistorical phenomenon. This isn’t to say that the various episodes of anti-Jewish persecution weren’t ghastly, only that Jews have been persecuted for so many conflicting geopolitical, ideological, and xenophobic reasons, it’s nearly impossible to label every single instance as holding some…

The Tea Party, the Blind Man, and the Elephant: Part 1

By Julie Ingersoll

…the shop he could have a free sub. Now the place hosts (and I mean hosts: free wings and sausage and their locally-famous sweet tea) a monthly tea party meeting. I’ll admit to being put off when a few weeks back the character of the sign changed: it said “a red-neck, Bible thumping (something or other) owns this joint,” making me feel generally unwelcome. Last night there were over 100 people there. When one speaker asked how many were “new” near…

Eat, Pray, Trash: What the Critics Don’t See

By Ben Brazil

…e the industrializing West has become increasingly “inauthentic,” Latin America, Africa, and (especially) Asia have been deemed “authentic.” Dean MacCannell noticed just this projected sort of authenticity in his 1976 The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. But even before the Beatles went to India, elite Westerners had begun juxtaposing the “spiritual” East to the “materialist” West, a move that (as post-colonial critics have pointed out)…

Kanye West’s Critique of Prosperity Preaching

By Josef Sorett

…free in verse: “I’m not trying to profit off the prophet so this one’s for free.” He does this, ironically, even as his lyrics laud one of the most prominent black prosperity preachers, Creflo Dollar. Apparently, the two share a commitment to, as Lupe puts it, “no sex before you’re married,” if not a business ethic. And then there’s the fact that Kanye recorded three different videos for the song. Two of these got plenty of play on major cable net…

Another Far Right Theocrat Shows up on the Trump Team

By Julie Ingersoll

…ence. ACLJ has developed an international presence and launched The East African Center for Law and Justice in 2010 when several African countries were revising their constitutions. They worked to secure privileged status for “biblical principles,” including the outlawing of abortion (even when the mother’s life was in danger) and homosexuality, fighting for punishments as draconian as death and life imprisonment. Their efforts in that regard are…

Pope’s ‘Joy of Love’ Brings Little Joy To LGBT Catholics; Gay Atheist Malaysian Granted Refugee Status In Canada; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…gn calling for decriminalization of consensual gay sex in Morocco. South Africa: Even in ‘Born Free’ Generation, Black Lesbians Face Violence The BBC ran a report this week on anti-LGBT violence in South Africa, telling the story of a lesbian woman who was a member of the “born free generation” – born in 1994, the year apartheid ended – and who was murdered and mutiliated in December. In a country where crime rates in general are high, black lesbi…

American Brokenness: A Lament

By Daniel Schultz

…eral perspective is illegitimate; that it is wrong and dangerous and un-American and evil. More to the point, they have been told that liberals are not needed. They have been told that the nation would be better off without anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan; that an America with a particular construct of traditional social mores, an adventurous military, and an unfettered corporate capitalism could keep them safe and happy. Liberals, the story g…