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State as Executioner: Rick Perry Did Not Invent the Death Penalty

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…t, and multiple, chapters where race-based violence led to the use of state-sanctioned killing as a way to terrorize US citizens. The result is a history that can rival Greece’s for blood and horror. In the eyes of my Greek friends, any nation with our history of plantation slavery, Jim and Jane Crow, lynchings, and Klan-sponsored terror would be ill-advised and morally deaf were it to grant the power of killing to the state, save in time of war….

Why the Methodist Effort to Discipline Sessions Is a Risky Business

By Daniel Schultz

…f a passage from Romans 13 in defense of the policy, a citation the Rev. Susan Henry-Crowe, top executive of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society called “unsound, a flawed interpretation, and a shocking violation of the spirit of the Gospel.” The UMNS article says charges against lay members is very rare in the UMC, a point amplified by reporting from Religion News Service. It’s possible that Sessions could face a church trial, though…

Shhh…Don’t Speak of Abortion: Roe v. Wade at Thirty-Six

By Frederick Clarkson

…is missing from this document is any invitation for faith leaders, both pro-choice and pro-life with whom we disagree, to talk about abortion—and other choices involving women’s reproductive health and to model that dialogue to the country.” The idea that abortion is sometimes the best moral choice is the view of many major religious institutions representing tens of millions of American Christians, Jews, Unitarians, and others. Many of these inst…

Catholic Church Campaigns Against Gay US Ambassador; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…lian living in India. Sri Lanka: LGBTI Activist Profiled Alturi profiles Rosanna Flamer-Caldera, a Sri Lankan native who left the country as a teen and returned years later. She cofounded EQUAL GROUND, which has advocated for LGBTI Sri Lankans for a dozen years. China: Lack of Marriage Equality Sends Lesbian Couples to Overseas Sperm Banks Global Times reports that Chinese lesbian couples are using overseas sperm banks because they do not have leg…

Israel Votes to Limit Sheldon Adelson

By Sarah Posner

…t donor to the Israeli American Council (mission: “to build an engaged and united Israeli-American community that strengthens our next generations, the American Jewish community, and the State of Israel”) accused Jewish Daily Forward reporter Nathan Guttman of lacking professionalism in journalism, and intimated that he is anti-Israel. Speaking with the IAC co-funder Haim Saban (a Democratic Party donor), Adelson twisted remarks Guttman made durin…

This World Refugee Day, Rising White Nationalism Meets the Largest Refugee Population in History — Which is No Coincidence

By Sara Kamali

…Latine families who’ve been seeking the same safe havens for years in the United States as those granted to white Ukrainian refugees at the US-Mexico border in a matter of hours? CBS News foreign correspondent Chris D’Agata provided an unintentionally revealing answer to these questions in February 2022, when he suggested that Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, was an unexpected site of war, because it was “civilized,’’ unlike “Iraq or Afghanistan, th…

Who Could Possibly Take Issue With ‘Human Dignity’? Beware of Trojan Horses

By Peter Schwartz

…lth Initiatives to become CommonSpirit Health, the 5th-largest (and the 2nd-largest non-profit) hospital system in the United States. Here’s how Dignity Health explains its adoption of the term “dignity” to represent its identity to the world. “Holding the value of dignity means we show respect for persons, not for anything they do or any rank they hold, but because they reflect the face of God.” Dignity Health possesses deep and intricate ties to…

When Rabbis Seized Control of the Synagogue: The Role of Authority in American Judaism

By Zev Eleff

…ligion a monograph that focuses on the formative century of Judaism in the United States, one that places this faith community in the broader context of American religion. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? Readers will gain a deeper understanding of religious authority and the tensions it caused between lay and religious leaders. Beyond this, I hope scholars and students of American religion will use this work as a model to…

Sheldon Adelson’s Long Game

By Sarah Posner

…sterday, Adelson’s “right-hand man is to assume a key position at Taglit-Birthright, in a move that could signal the conservative billionaire’s desire to wield more influence on policy-making at the organization, which brings tens of thousand of young Jewish adults to Israel on free 10-day trips each year.” His goals are probably more than religious and cultural, of course, as he likely views Birthright kids as future Republican voters, or at leas…

Biblical Inerrancy: Responses to “What Do ‘The Christians’ Believe?”

By C. Joshua Villines

…Unfortunately, even if we were to turn the clock all the way back to first-century Jerusalem we find, as Acts 15 reminds us, that even the Apostles who knew Jesus personally were divided on how Christians should behave. This diversity of opinion continued into the fourth century, when the leaders of the Church gathered together to clarify what Christians actually believed. Those meetings ultimately produced three documents that remain the only co…