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Special Hell: Progressive Catholics Reckon With the Rise of Trump

By Patricia Miller

…and create “carve-outs” from recognition of same-sex marriage. “Catholics are acutely aware of the threat posed by a potential alliance between VP-elect Pence and the USCCB in expanding religious exemptions,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, head of the Catholic LGBTQ rights organization Dignity USA. She reports that members of Dignity were very concerned about “potential rollbacks of gains in civil rights.” Most progressive Catholics I spoke with are…

A Memoir of Jewish, Transgender Spirituality

By Joy Ladin

…e was no true self to do that writing? I tell writing students that our fears are like spotlights shining on closed doors. Opening those doors may or may not lead to good writing, but they always lead to important discoveries about ourselves. I had given that advice too many times not to take it, so I trashed the first essay and started writing about gender transition in the way that scared me the most: personally, autobiographically, as honestly…

Bobby Jindal Squares Packing Heat with Jesus

By Welton Gaddy

…siness, or a civic auditorium (recall his defense for using taxpayers’ dollars to fly around Louisiana giving his Christian testimony exclusively in evangelical churches). Little wonder that he would fail to see a difference between carrying concealed weapons to a church and to a civil protest. But, thankfully, no government leader gets the right to determine the sanctity of a place of worship and what happens there. To the State Legislature of Lo…

Among the Problems with Trump’s Proposed Ban: Who is a Muslim?

By Michael Schulson

…e, because the majority of self-identified Muslims are not Arabs, and many Arabs are not Muslims. But, incoherent or not, there’s clearly a racial dynamic at play in American political conversation about Islam today. Why else would brown-skinned Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians sometimes be subjected to ostensibly anti-Muslim violence? The racial language isn’t confined to those who support an immigration ban. As one indignant Republican voter recent…

I Am Better than Him

By Amina Wadud

…g some part of the Qur’an that was recounting the story but the word istikbar, or arrogance, came up in various forms. I wanted to see how I might elaborate on the issue. Especially after another encounter yesterday with one of my daughters, whose new-age life style has led her to a level of arrogance I can sometimes barely manage to abide by. I think it is good and necessary for all human beings to continually make choices that they think will im…

Pigging Out: What ‘Radically Unkosher’ Jewish Foodies Like Michael Pollan Are Missing

By Jonathan Schorsch

…h boundaries considered, with some justification, Egypt to be a cruel and barbaric empire of hypocritical elites and abhorrent licentiousness, and Canaanite society thoroughly immoral from its forms of sexuality to child-sacrificing religiosity. We don’t have to share these perspectives, or the prohibitions derived from them, but as motivations for a culture they are hardly arbitrary or unique. Pollan ignores what is perhaps the most common explan…

Fired GTS Professors Go Back to Work, For Now

By Steve A. Wiggins

…rt is required. Or a scandal occurs. (No expert required.) Since most seminaries are quiet institutions with modest student enrollments, the higher eduction community frequently overlooks the stand-alones as outside the mainstream. Many academics in religious studies, however, pass through seminaries at some stage in their careers and the steady influence of seminaries has been a kind of stabilizing influence in the give-and-take of academia in th…

Religion as a Front for Tyranny: A Roundtable on the Timeliness of Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”

By Anita Little

…tation of The Handmaid’s Tale, is a warning that echoes in our time. When Margaret Atwood published the dystopian novel in 1985, she said there was nothing in the book that hadn’t already happened. What makes the story so eerie to read now is that sense of recognition, of creeping familiarity. The fact that the book has maintained its relevance for more than three decades—and has now been given a second life as a TV series—reveals the enduring qua…

Ihram: Dressing for the King

By Amina Wadud

…n’t want to be vain. The style of the dress also begs for plain-ness. Both are, dare I say it, like sack dresses. One opens in the front with a few buttons, no collar, just a small hem, and the other has a short zipper in the back with a Nehru collar. Neither of them has any darts. What’s wrong with a dart, I wonder about that too? The ones I got in Indonesia have a lining (you know how transparent white clothes are, right? The U.S. ones have a se…

How Not to Talk to the NAACP

By Joanna Brooks

…e lexicon of partisan ugly. If you want to describe the Affordable Healthcare Act as “Obamacare” in your own house, that’s your business. But when you get invited to the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, you don’t say “Obamacare” because you don’t use fighting words when you’re a guest in somebody else’s house. It’s bad manners. No one imagined Mitt Romney was going to win any votes in that NAACP…