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Dear White Evangelicals: A Black Square Ain’t Gonna Cut It

By Jhas Williams

…doubt that a start would have been not being able to count on one hand the number of Black children in my entire Christian school student-body. Do Black educators only exist in public schools? Of course not. Why then couldn’t we find more Black scholars to employ when it came to teaching children? I can tell you that I’ll recognize change as genuine when white preachers and ministers stop using Bible verses to pacify their white congregants by amp…

Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

By Alana Massey

…u will go out with joy/And be led forth with peace; The mountains and the hills will break forth into shouts of joy before you/And all the trees of the field will clap their hands.” The latter song features lyrics such as “You gave your body to the lonely/They took your clothes/You gave up a wife and a family/You gave your ghost,” which certainly sounds awfully close to the sacrifices of Jesus. And if that were not enough evidence, the concluding…

Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

By Patricia Miller

…one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or who feels less horrible about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal, which had Boston at its epicenter. That’s a pretty low bar, but of course n…

8: The Mormon Proposition Gets It Right

By Joanna Brooks

…have dismissed the film as blatantly false. But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [See also Holly Welker’s review here. – Eds] Some take exception to editing choices that sequence events out of context for dramatic effect; others wish that the filmmakers had not been so cartoonish in their depictions of anti-gay-marriage standpoints, using only notori…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…ered our nation ungovernable. Worldwide, religious sentiments have been mobilized to torture and murder. I understand that religion itself is not to blame; followers can distort religious teachings and politicians can cloak ethnic hostilities and turf wars in religious language. Yet even so—people believe that they are acting in God’s name. Second: Gallup speculated that the growing sense of religion’s decline has less to do with personal religios…

The Best the Largest Progressive Jewish Org Could Come Up With?

By Jay Michaelson

…in America, Jews by choice, most Jews of color, and Jews in interfaith families do not share this narrative. Of course, this history is open to all who seek to claim it, all of those groups included. But it’s curious that BtA explains its social justice commitments not in the age-old teachings of the Jewish tradition (e.g., “You shall not mistreat a stranger, nor oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21)) but in mo…