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Should Christians Confess to Plants? A Cranky Meditation

…t to participate. If liturgy asks people to pray or sing things that raise reservations, they find themselves in a quandary. It feels wrong to participate, and it feels equally problematic to refrain. Although I very much appreciate innovative worship, I have experienced this situation too many times. To be sure, I feel uncomfortable with worship every week. I’m asked to affirm things I desire to believe when the truth is that I carry doubts and r…

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Christians of Color Are Rejecting “Colonial Christianity” and Reclaiming Ancestral Spiritualities

…she joined the protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock reservation. She spent her time in the kitchen in the Hoopa camp where a small band of volunteers stood over gas stoves and served thousands. The native women she cooked alongside of saw her as their own, even if their geographic origins differed. At one point, a pair of donated boots with a native aesthetic arrived on the camp. They wanted to give the boots to a native wom…

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Polygamy, Genius, and the Origin of Religion

…how up in proclivities toward certain behaviors. I say possible with a key reservation: even if these proclivities were there, we’d probably be terribly equipped to discern them. There’s no question that male and female roles are deeply conditioned by culture, by physical differences, and by power—which is to say, by patriarchy. A whole lot is happening here outside of any evolution-and-genetics explanation. Additionally, researchers are coming at…

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Yankton Sioux Revive Isnati Coming of Age Ceremony

…young Navajo women in this generation—including young women who leave the reservation for education—can return home to be with their relatives. What kind of support do our religious traditions give our daughters as they mature? How do we prepare them for and honor their transition into adulthood? What kind of imbalances and problems in our communities result from failing to prepare and honor young women? As a mother of two daughters and a feminis…

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American Missionary Could Face Genocide Charges, But Brazil’s Indigenous Communities Have a Bigger Problem

…azil’s National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI) following his venture into a reservation inhabited by the isolated Hi-Merima tribe in the southern Amazonas. FUNAI, the government agency on indigenous affairs, stated that the missionary could be charged with genocide for exposing the tribe to potentially deadly microbes. A second-generation missionary, Steve Campbell has lived with the neighboring Jamamadi people since 1963. He said he was teaching t…

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“The Camp Is a Ceremony”: A Report From Standing Rock

…ngered state is a huge improvement. In Oceti Sakowin camp on Standing Rock reservation, we learned this week about the elemental nature of water and its centrality to life. “Mni wiconi,” Lakota for “water is life,” is the battle cry of this camp and this movement—and it will not go silent no matter what happens with this particular pipeline. The movement is already far bigger and visitors are encouraged to take the fight for the preservation of wa…

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Again, Vatican Punishes Gender Equality More Swiftly Than Sexual Abuse

…ed notorious dictators such as Gen. Manuel Noriega and was implicated in a number of human rights abuses in Latin America, including the murder of six Jesuits. In contrast to the relative alacrity with which the CDF moved against three elderly peace activists who celebrated mass with a woman, it took the Vatican 13 years to finally expel Michael Fugee from the priesthood in mid-March. Fugee admitted to fondling a 14-year-old boy in 2001 but his co…

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Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…

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The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…

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Vatican Reverses Anti-Liberation Policies in Mexico

…ate, an ancient institution revived by Vatican II. In 2000, 341 of Mexico’s 800 deacons served the Diocese of San Cristobal, the largest number of deacons in any Catholic diocese in the world. Vatican suspicion of Bishop Ruiz’s liberationist pastoral strategy resulted in a failed attempt to remove him in 1993. The deacon program came under particular scrutiny after the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, with reports that Maya catechists defied th…

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