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Post-Paris Reflections: We May Have to Learn to Hope

By Donna Schaper

…forget Paris because Paris has a way of saying “I’m here.” Golden Rule The best slogan I heard repeated in Paris is “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” The other phrase that stuck has to do with some parts of the world being “sacrifice zones.” (h/t Naomi Klein for that coinage.) Women from North Dakota joined Hawaiians who joined Filipinos in describing themselves as people who live in Sacrifice Zones. This is the same logic that has…

Reporting from Paris During COP21: A Haunted Sabbath

By Donna Schaper

…ding, thinking, acting outside of the spotlight, which is now on them. The best reporting concurred. Amy Goodman on Democracy Now reported on the Nicaraguan minister explaining why they weren’t publicizing or offering their national carbon reduction goals. “Because we are going green on our own and don’t want to participate in the farce of rich countries asking us to pay for their abuse of each other and the earth.” The New Republic once again put…

Does Violence Always Win?: Learning From René Girard (1923-2015)

By Martha J. Reineke

…im as the passive instrument of its own transformation. Law also marks the site of sacrifice. Other markers typically are suppressed; thus, the only remaining testimony to culture-creating violence is contamination and pollution that seep out of the Law. For over three decades, scholars of religion have drawn on Girard to inform their work. Christian theologians and New Testament scholars have found Girard’s insights on the scapegoat mechanism of…

Why Kim Davis Has Missed Her Moment

By Sarah Posner

…view among a group of evangelical thought leaders interviewed for the web site Breakpoint, Hunter Baker, a lawyer and political science professor at Union University, opined, “Kim Davis’s office is obligated to perform the state function of issuing wedding certificates. She disagrees that marriage can exist between two people of the same sex. I agree with her.” But, Baker maintained, “the state of Kentucky has little choice other than to respect…

American Horror Story: Hotel and Monotheism’s Dirty Little Secrets

By W. Scott Poole

…, blood-drenched gore-fest that television has ever seen. So far, it’s the best season yet. Past seasons certainly inflicted some fairly can-they-even-do-that-on-basic-cable moments on the tender-hearted. Still, this time around there’s plenty going on in just the first episode that competes with the Minotaur sex of yesteryear. Ghosts in rubber bondage suits now seem so 2011. Lady Gaga somehow managed to upstage herself in an early scene that open…

For International Human Rights Day, a Snapshot of LGBT Rights from the Vatican to Cape Town

By Peter Montgomery

…ess of Families speaker. According to a report on the right-wing Breitbart site: The International Organization for the Family (IOF) rolled out its “Cape Town Declaration” in South Africa Friday, reaffirming the critical role of traditional man-woman marriage as the bedrock of civilization. The Declaration, already signed by hundreds of religious, political, social, and civic leaders from all the continents, states that the family is the “first an…

Satanist Religious Freedom Rally Successful Despite Neo-Nazis and Christian Heckler

By Joseph Laycock

…in Little Rock and pointed out the Buddhist Ecumenical Society on the opposite side of the capitol. He felt that Arkansas politics used to be more cognizant of the establishment clause, citing the backlash against governor Frank White when he signed a bill mandating creation science in public schools. A pastor who did not wish to be named had a similar view. “This is a religiously plural city,” he told me. “If you name the faith, I can direct you…

Will “Church Militants” Be Marching for Trump?

By Patricia Miller

…ng Catholicism. The flagship of the movement is the ChurchMilitant.com web site run by Michael Voris, which rails against “globalism, immigration, social-welfare programs and abortion,” while depicting an “existential war against radical Islam,” with a healthy dose of anti-Semitism. And in case that sounds ready-made for the Trump era, it is. As BuzzFeed reported shortly after the election, Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, addressed a Vatic…

Unmasking the “Veiled Prophet” Behind a 135-Year-Old St. Louis Tradition

By Spencer Dew

…orced the notion of a benevolent cultural elite,” as the St. Louis city website puts it. The organization still runs a debutante ball where men of high society display their daughters to one another once they come of age. “The preeminent formal gala for introducing young ladies,” as the Veiled Prophet Organization puts it. The gala gives the young women a chance to feel like princesses, guarded by men made up in Orientalist drag as “Bengal Lancers…

Betrayed at the Polls, Evangelicals of Color at a Crossroads

By Deborah Jian Lee

…icals of color to change course. But not everyone is leaving. As a growing number of minorities redefine their associations, many have chosen to see white evangelical spaces as their “mission field,” but not their source of spiritual nourishment. These days, SueAnn Shiah just gets angry during church sermons. Still, the Taiwanese American congregant at a conservative, white church in Nashville, remains committed to serving on the church’s racial j…