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Na’vi and Goliath: Palestinian Protesters Dress as Avatar Underdogs

By Shalom Goldman

…e American Jewish press. In The Forward, the popular and culturally astute New York Jewish weekly, regular columnist Jay Michaelson wrote a January 22 piece titled “Taking Avatar Seriously: Environmentalisms, Spiritual and Practical,” describing the film’s philosophy as “a bit of pantheism, a bit of nature mysticism, and a surprising dash of monotheism, as well. In other words, it’s Kabbalah.” Avatar’s Kabbalism, Michaelson concluded, is “a challe…

Kill Your Patriarchs: An Interview with Michael Muhammad Knight

By Hussein Rashid

…t by him, because I do not recognize him. I curse him, thinking that he, a New York newbie, has given me the wrong street corner. After I keep him waiting for 30 minutes (because of my mistake), I offer to buy him a cone from The Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. He pays for his. I am not sure where the cone, or his boot, may end up as we talk. MMK is considered to be the father of the American Muslim Punk Movement. His originally self-published novel, The…

The Heresies of Christopher Hitchens

By Austin Dacey

…tchens recounts a scene caused by Susan Sontag at a left-wing gathering in New York City in 1982. The purpose of the event was to stand in solidarity with the Solidarity movement, begun by dockworkers at the Lenin shipyards of Gdansk, Poland, calling for better wages, prices, and the legalization of trade unions independent of the Communist Party. Sontag shocked those assembled by denouncing all communism: I repeat; not only is Fascism (and overt…

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

By Sarah Posner

…art-time rabbi for Congregation Tikkun v’Or, a Reform synagogue in Ithaca, New York, sits on both the JVP Rabbinic Council and the J Street Rabbinic Cabinet. While the emergence of JVP has “widened the discourse of rabbis,” he claims that there remain “many rabbis” who would want to affiliate with JVP but can’t “because there are severe limitations on what you can do as a rabbi and still hold a job.” Progressive Zionist rabbis like Kleinbaum and B…

Why We Need a Public Black Theology for the 21st Century

By Vincent Lloyd

…following the debate about Glaude’s essay on National Public Radio, in The New York Times, and even at The Root, the Henry Louis Gates-founded blog geared toward the Black upper-middle class. Where were the Black theologians? They do exist: in our age of institutionalized multiculturalism, every divinity school and seminary knows that they need one. Academic Black theology began with Black Christian intellectuals inserting themselves into the publ…

Creating a Cell: Science Plays God

By Arri Eisen

…play God’ all the time, every day (from the design, testing, and using of drugs to handing down court decisions); such new organisms need to be strictly regulated and monitored, easily traceable, and tested in the external environment, because they always do eventually enter it; the government, industry, universities, and scientists at the federal and international level should be and are discussing and monitoring such issues; Homeland Security sh…

Obama to Cave on Bush Tax Cuts: Letter to the Washingtonians, Chapter 1

By Daniel Schultz

…born, though I did not know him at the time. His mother, poor, ill, and struggling with drugs and booze, lost him and his sister to the county some time later. I doubt very much that as she sank into the arms of addiction that she took notice of one election after another, of one economic setback after another, of torture and Katrina and corruption and the undermining of civil liberties. I am sure that she had no idea that Democrat after Democrat…

Papal Retirement: A Matter of Conscience

By Mary E. Hunt

…is in the air because we put it there. Progressive Catholics all over the world are creating new forms of church since the old is so thoroughly discredited. No institution can withstand the onslaught of negative publicity that the Vatican earned over clergy sexual abuse and episcopal cover-ups without major changes. No hierarchy however fortified can hold out forever against spirit-filled steps toward equality and justice. This time, just electin…

The Surprisingly Short History of Popular Yoga

By Andrea R. Jain and Michelle Goldberg

…omfortable with how yoga was being practiced. Now the class is back with a new instructor—a South Asian instructor—who worries she was hired only because she’s Indian. The incident was the latest in a string of cultural flashpoints surrounding the centuries-old Indian practice, and has made many a yogi rethink the lines between cultural exchange and cultural appropriation. In the following conversation, journalist Michelle Goldberg and professor A…

Selling the Idea of a Christian Nation: David Barton’s Alternate Intellectual Universe

By Paul Harvey

…all the refutations and belittling of pedigree, Barton still appears in a New York Times “puff piece,” argues with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, and fields calls from congressmen and presidential candidates. In short, if this were a basketball game between Barton and professional historians, in some ways it’s already a rout, with Barton far ahead and the scrubs in to play out the garbage time. Ideas Packaged as Products Some of that is because o…