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Before Black Twitter: How the Early Black Press Shaped American Discourse Around Race and Religion

By Benjamin P. Fagan

…antebellum black newspapers have made it into conversations about American history, or the history of journalism, they are typically cast as mainly abolitionist publications. To be sure, all of the papers that I discuss in the book agitated for an end to slavery, but they also took up a host of other issues. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I really tried to write the book for a general audience, as I think that the people an…

Economy Yields Too Few Prophets

By Peter Laarman

…t things moving again?; and (3) Shhhh-it’s Obama: don’t give ammunition to his enemies. Here’s my answer. There is no such thing as “the economy”: there are multiple economies, multiple interests, in play. But to Washington, and to the pack journalists who feed us our daily economic news, the only economy that really matters is the Dow, the NASDQ, and the S&P 500. If you follow the business press, as I do, the only question is whether some “green…

The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut

By Douglas Harrison

…uals over the past 30 years. What do you think are some of the origins of this shift? I connect the extreme homophobia in the black church of the last twenty-five to thirty years to the intrusion of particular right-wing elements within our culture. I don’t want to say these are exclusively white because unfortunately there is a long tradition of reactionary tendencies within the black church. But there are a whole bunch of famous white evangelis…

Is Torture Utilitarian?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…entities unified by certain Constitutional principles that are not in the least utilitarian, though of the very highest moral consequence to everyone. Perhaps something like this common ground is what this supremely awful week might yet enable us to see, and to say….

Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

By Bill Berkowitz

…atholic colleges to seek exemption from title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex discrimination. About two dozen schools have been granted such exemptions by the civil rights office of the Department of Education. How has the religious right evolved over the years? Conservative Christianity has systematically transformed itself into a formidable 21st century theocratic political movement, developing an electoral capacity that is broad…

Liberty University’s In-House Conversion ‘Therapist’ Retires, But Will the Christian School Cease This Discredited Practice?

By Lucas Wilson

…Liberty is eminently justified, especially given Emerick’s parting words, which are, simply put, chilling: “When someone asks me how many children I have, I tell them three daughters and thousands of sons.” This disturbing sentiment hints at the overwhelming number of students who were habitually subjugated to Emerick’s chaotic work. The question, however, remains: While neither he nor Liberty referred to him as a therapist of any kind, how was it…

Church and State in Japan: The Case of the Yasukuni Shrine

By Mark R. Mullins

…rate their family members from the “cage” of the Yasukuni Shrine. Masaharu Hishiki, a Buddhist priest and scholar, and leader of the support group for the plaintiffs in the Osaka case, finds it ironic that Articles 20 and 89 of the postwar Constitution, meant to establish religious freedom and “protect” people from the coercive practices of State Shinto (such as forced shrine visits during the war) are today being used to “protect” the religious f…

Republicans “Evangelizing” Catholic Voters

By Patricia Miller

…fficking. As I note in Salon: According to Pew, between 2009 and 2014, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration — and by inference the Democratic Party — was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent. This suggests that the war on religion is resonating with Catholic voters who increasingly see themselves on the losing side of a culture war and feel the need to assert their religious identity i…

Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

By William E. Smith

…ed to think about what, if anything, comes next for marriage. Among other things, this is an opportunity to revisit the old slippery slope argument that some have pushed for so many years. In other words, now that same-sex marriage is legal, what’s next? According to a number of pundits, such as Fredrik DeBoer at Politico, it’s polygamy. I count myself among this group. This question is pressing in light of the fact that support for polygamy has r…

What’s in a Name? Religious Nones and the American Religious Landscape

By Richard Flory

…ly among younger people, that might be thought of as the “It’s All Good” ethic, which tends to stretch across the religious and non-religious alike about many life issues. As applied specifically to religion, there is an acknowledgment that others can believe—or not believe—whatever they want: “It’s all good,” at least so long as nobody gets hurt. Since the entire category is based on non-affiliation, all those people who may identify with a parti…