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A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…g meals or the “click, click, click” of the computer mouse in response to “free shipping!” “40 % off!” or “Buy one get one free!” in the United States, we are gluttonous consumers of material goods (and food, but that is a whole other subject). The value and consequences of shopping in dominant US culture puts the consumer on a roller-coaster ride. One year we are told that excessive, unwise spending and its resultant debt have led our country int…

The Religious “Right” to Denounce Homosexuality

By Sarah Posner

…environment around 2005, when there was a highly noticeable uptick in the number of services, prayer breakfasts, emails from chaplains, displays of crosses, and other evangelical activity that struck her as “excessive.” But what bothered Major Williams most was the Strong Bonds program, which she attended at an Orlando hotel in January 2008. Included in the Strong Bonds conference tote bag was a camouflage box with a New Life Ministries inscripti…

Walt Whitman’s Sacred Democracy

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ates, self-contain’d, different from others, more expansive, more rich and free, to be evidenced by original authors and poets to come, by American personalities, plenty of them, make and female, traversing the states, none excepted… and by a sublime and serious Religious Democracy sternly taking command, dissolving the old, sloughing off the surfaces, and from its own interior and vital principles reconstructing, democratizing society. A religio…

How “Gratitude” Underwrites Inequality, Power and Exclusion

By Eric C. Miller

…le was emphatic that Christianity was the one thing standing in the way of free market capitalism taking over the United States and ruining the morals of the citizens. He saw Christianity as providing a check on market logics. There have been times when certain forms of Christianity—that of the Transcendentalists in the 1830s and 40s, for instance—exhibited the potential for a gospel of debt forgiveness to stand in opposition to the free market. B…

The Problem with the Notion of “Closely-Held Corporations” in Hobby Lobby

By Kara Loewentheil

…, not a religious rights issue, but it gets to one of the complications of free exercise rights. Some areas of law operate vertically, let’s say, since they’re mostly self-referential and one can acquire expertise in them without much reference to other areas of law. But religious rights work horizontally, as they come into interaction, and conflict, with many other categories of law. And it’s impossible to be expert in all types of law, even for…

We Can’t Have Religious Freedom Without Reproductive Freedom

By Frederick Clarkson and Cari Jackson

…under the First Amendment. We think it’s time for us all to seek religious freedom for reproductive freedom, and to recognize that persistent efforts to interfere in reproductive decisions is “an infringement of a natural right” in the sense the Virginia Statute warned. Of course, women didn’t share in this natural right at the time—but the right to believe differently than the rich and the powerful as codified in the Statute and the First Amendme…

Romania’s “Witch Tax”: Magic Meets Bureaucracy

By Joseph Laycock

…nials for her craft. A National Center of Witchcraft? Witches adapted to a free market quickly. Emerging businesses sought their aide, creating a growing clientele for witchcraft. In 1997, there was an attempt to form a “witches’ union,” in part to counter the claims of dozens of upstart witches that they were descendants of Mama Omida. In 1999, there was even a plan to build a thirty-five room “national center of witchcraft” on the outskirts of…

Why So Many American Christians Don’t Understand Protest

By Leah Pannell

…s that these protests—against black death, for black life, for justice and freedom for all people—were disrespectful, disruptive. They shouldn’t inconvenience others by blocking interstates, interrupting games. Yet in Luke 4, Jesus stood in the synagogue, echoed the words of the prophet Isaiah that the oppressed shall be free, and proceeded to be disruptive. In response to the media attention Kaepernick’s actions garnered, Franklin Graham stood be…

American Infidel: Robert Ingersoll Was the “Great Agnostic” of the (Last) Gilded Age

By Peter Laarman

…and music, was devoted to his wife and daughters, and gave his money away freely. Jacoby makes a convincing case that Ingersoll belongs to the egalitarian and humanistic thread of American secularism rather than Social Darwinist thread. And, in fact, Ingersoll stoutly rejected the contempt for the “lower orders” (immigrants, people of color) that was being shown in the 1880s and onward by leading Darwinists like Herbert Spencer and William Graham…

Is Accreditation of Religious Institutions a “Farce”?

By Eric C. Miller

…oard of overstepping the First Amendment and infringing on their rights to free religious exercise and free speech.” Among the colleges and seminaries that spurn regional accreditation, many justify their decision by citing freedom from governmental oversight, a position compatible with the conservative mentality often dominant at such institutions. Ideologically consistent, this claim has the ancillary benefit of helping its makers dodge the cost…