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Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…ans, affluent gentlemen, and those with philosophical and scientific interests, started to join the lodges, drawn by their social conviviality and their traditions of ritual and secrecy. This custom of including non-stonemasons in the lodges, called “speculative Freemasonry,” spread from Scotland to England, and then took off as an international movement. Masonic initiations included some amount of mild ritual hazing, intended to disorient the ini…

“Reconciliation” With Indigenous People is Comforting For Many Canadians, But is a Christian Concept Up To The Task?

By Pamela Klassen and Joseph Wiebe

…or settlers, the Calls include specific tasks for universities and for Christian institutions, such as “the need to respect Indigenous spirituality in its own right.” Both Christian and non-Christian settlers in Canadian seem to desire peace and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and yet injustice remains. Why? In short: land. While calling for the repudiation of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery that is the shaky ground of all colonial sove…

Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

By Nick Street

…wo months visiting places that actively discriminate against queer folks. “Statistically,” she continues, “a third of homeless young people identify as gay, bisexual, or transgender. That’s the result in many cases of this message from some Christians who say that if you are gay or transgender you are not worthy—which families and friends use to justify their rejection of young LGBT people. I encounter them on the streets, and my agency recognizes…

Why Crux‘s Knights of Columbus “Partnership” is Problematic

By Kaya Oakes

…l headlines about Pope Francis focus on his Easter message, and in the latest installment of “Papal Phone Calls,” Pope Francis called a sick seminarian and told him to “keep his chin up.” An analysis of the murder of a Congolese priest again focuses on anti-Christian attitudes and calls for a “new concept of martyrdom.” The focus of the site seems to be moving more toward being about Pope Francis and anti-Christian terrorism abroad, and less about…

Too Hot for Shul: Rabbis Seek Healthy Israel Dialogue After Gaza

By Sarah Posner

…ghly charged it can set off even self-described doves and progressive Zionists: questioning Zionism as central to Jewish identity. Rabbi Brant Rosen, who for 17 years led the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Illinois, recently stepped down from his pulpit, following a summer of protest against the Gaza war with the left-wing Jewish Voice for Peace, on whose Rabbinical Council he serves. (Compared to J Street’s 800-plus-member Rab…

Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

By Arthur Waskow

…and the flatness of what they had experienced as conventional Jewish life. Stirred, still others, by their hopes and fears for the State of Israel, which had stood on the edge of deeply dangerous waters in 1967, and crossed—they thought—in triumph. But even that early, some were stirred to worry about warnings of a long Occupation. Some who had never been welcomed into the hidden places of Jewish thought and practice, were stirred by the joy and t…

Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…on some of the facets of Pentecostalism that have helped to make it the fastest growing religious movement in the world. I spoke to Andrew this week, on the eve of the film’s Los Angeles premiere, about what it was like to spend time behind bars and how he became part of the lives of the men whose stories he tells in his film. How did you end up spending two weeks in a Brazilian prison? I was conducting research for my dissertation; honestly, I h…

A Muslim Reflects on Christian Theologian (and UCLA Coach) John Wooden

By Amir Hussain

…the rest of his life. As a part of the great migration from the rural Midwest to the urban West, he could sympathize with both urban and rural concerns. Basketball, of course, was common to both, played with equal fervor by farm boys in Indiana and gang bangers in South Central. And not only did he survive in the wilds of Los Angeles, he thrived, voted by the Sporting News in 2009 as the greatest coach of all time. As a young Muslim kid growing up…

Hajj Journal: M & M

By Amina Wadud

…hrib prayer. Well, that did not go over at all, and honestly, it was my first and last attempt at making some sense out of this ragtag sharing of experiences with 70 strange women. Although collectively, for the whole tent, this did not work (or should I say was declined), individually I did it with my neighbor. A few other ladies came later to tell me they had also done it in smaller groups. This inability to organize ourselves into a group affec…

Our Lady of Good Hope and Excellent Behavior: Why this Apparition and Why Now?

By Lisa Bitel

…onal experiences with little or no meaning for the larger community of Christians. Still, as with other institutional policies on private behavior, church leaders could never police visions. They could only try to punish reports of visions and apparitions and devotions to rogue Virgins and saints. The only viable alternative was to ignore most visionaries while selecting just a few to promote as exemplary. Bishop Ricken is savvy: Adele Brise and h…