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For Better or Worse: The Rise of the Professional Wedding Celebrant

By Carlos Wilton

…e, or the professional handing out business cards at the bridal show—is a large part of the reason why. As the ranks of the spiritual-but-not-religious have grown, celebrants have emerged to fill a practical need: a made-to-order ceremony that includes as much or as little God-talk as their clients desire. (Many of them do funerals, too.) While I’d like to think most couples are comfortable enough with Christian faith to welcome the traditional li…

RDBook: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World: An Interview with Michelle Goldberg

By Mandy Van Deven

…or compromising the integrity of an indigenous organization’s work? There are a number of organizations that are really good at channeling aid to women working at the grassroots. The Global Fund for Women, for example, does amazing work. On a more macro scale, people in developed countries often have access to levers of power that people on the ground don’t. Agnes Pareyio’s story is instructive. She’s an amazing Masai woman in Kenya who runs a sh…

Putting the “Protest” Back in Protestant: Reclaiming the Spirit of Resistance

By Peter Laarman

…hing elders, worship leaders, among them—and some very good ones at that. Harvard and Yale were all about furnishing congregations with such learned divines. But their animating idea remained the priesthood of all believers; all readers. And thus they committed themselves, massively, to a program of popular free education, the very same program that made New England and then the United States the world paragon of literacy, and thus also of informe…

Rebuilding the Wall of Separation: A Progressive Discussion on Church & State

By Bruce Ledewitz

…ght to figure it all out for ourselves, and our best defense against the rear guard action being waged by the religious right and its allies in our time. So, sure, let’s have public religious and non-religious expressions in all of their richness and variety. But let’s also confront and defeat anything that would erode, in fact or appearance, the role of the government as the uncompromised guarantor of the rights of all. Linell Cady: Fred, I compl…

When Straight People Tell Gay Stories

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…his to invite anyone to a pity party. I am proud of my little book and its little sales numbers. I have received many letters from grateful readers who were moved and who enjoyed the book. In reality, that’s all a writer really wants anyway—to know they’ve made a difference in someone’s life, even if it’s not on a grand scale. I do not write to complain, but to make a larger observation. My dear friend Jack Rogers, former Moderator of the 213th Ge…

Teaching World Religion in the Dumpster Fire

By Kate Blanchard

…can afford. It’s much more difficult to stay calm when one is living in a war zone, or one’s child is starving, or one’s body is wracked with pain. While the dumpster fire is certainly upsetting to me, I imagine it is utterly terrifying to those who are facing imminent hate crimes, deportation, and serious medical conditions without health coverage. But to my fellow professors let me say this: our students do not need our hysteria. They do not nee…

Tyler Perry’s Museum of Blackness

By Sevonna Brown

…y teenaged daughter Cindy, pre-pubescent son Howie, and his senile mother Barbara are sent by Needleman’s attorney Brian (Tyler Perry) from the suburbs of New York to hide in a place not even the mob would think to look—in Madea’s (also Tyler Perry) Georgia home. As the unaware and reluctant witness, George is forced to figure out how his company pilfered millions of dollars. The black church is important to the storyline. A frantic Jake Nelson, w…

Want Straight Talk on the Romney-Rosen Mommy Wars?

By Joanna Brooks

…work. It will cost the state more, providing that day care. But I want the individuals to have the dignity of work. Why should the defense of stay-at-home motherhood not extend to working-class and impoverished women? Is parental caregiving not just as valuable for children living below the poverty line? As Mormon feminist housewives (and former housewives and working moms) weighed in this week, political spin is “hard to make soup with.”…

Updated with Response: The Black Church is Dead—Long Live the Black Church

By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

…the words of Langston Hughes, “We, too, sing America!” Intraracial class warfare, gender discrimination, ethnocentrism and xenophobia are all realities that retard African-American Protestant communities. Not to mention the lax restrictions and nonexistent ecclesial regulations of the evangelical tradition that continues to cultivate charismatic yet conniving religious leaders. Sure, for some, the black church represents freedom. But for others i…

Jesus, Gentrification, and the Hypocrisy of “Diversity”: An Interview with D.L. Mayfield

By Kaya Oakes

…y spoilers), when the meaning of the phrase “failed missionary” becomes clear. Part of this becomes about what Dorothy Day describes as “we were just sitting around talking,” or what we might call the “ministry of showing up with cake.” Can you describe what this means for you? D.L. Mayfield: For me, the journey of being a failed missionary means that I never managed to convert anyone to becoming a white, westernized Christian just like myself—and…