The Racial Politics of Atheism
The absence of historical and sociological context for atheist politics, and its disconnection from social justice activism, will keep it in the lily-white one-percent column.
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Waging Patience, Not Violence
For several years after 9/11, it was one of my favorite pastimes to browse the bookstores in airports in particular to check out the latest screed that had been published on the topic. All of this stoked a desire in me to write a book-length monograph soberly exploring the many dimensions of jihad as evident in different genres of Arabic language primary sources and to anchor these understandings in specific historical circumstances.
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Finding Love—and Dogma—in Unexpected Places: Jeff Chu’s Gay Christian Odyssey
Jeff Chu finds himself a little less strident when talking with people on both sides…
Read MoreAmerican Infidel: Robert Ingersoll Was the “Great Agnostic” of the (Last) Gilded Age
My grandfather, born to immigrants in 1878, was undoubtedly familiar with the all-but-forgotten figure of Robert Green Ingersoll, the “Great Agnostic,” who popularized Darwin for the millions, who championed the disgraced Thomas Paine, and who kept alive the important tradition of American free thought during the last quarter of the 19th century.
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Christians Should Give Up “Christianity”: An Interview with Peter Rollins
“That’s the good news of Christianity for me. It’s not that you can be happy and whole, but rather that life is crap and you don’t know the answers. It’s good news to be freed from the oppression that there’s something that’s going to make it all better.”
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Islam, Essential to America?
This book is my own effort to equip myself to talk about and engage with the nation’s fastest growing religion, to offer a snapshot of one of its most influential institutions, and to tell the stories of the students and scholars who have taken up the challenge of this experiment in American education.
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No Virginia, There’s No “Clash of Civilizations”
In a book geared toward the general reader, scholar Anne Norton confronts Islamophobia in the West and argues against the persistent notion that Islam and the West are locked in a cosmic battle.
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God Will Not Make You Straight: An Interview with GCN’s Justin Lee
“We really need to get rid of Ex-Gay groups. I would like to see Christians, en masse, abandon these groups, to recognize that they don’t work. If they want to help people be celibate because that’s what they believe people are called to do, more power to them, but to tell people they can become straight and torture them psychologically is incredibly wrong.”
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Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die
The latest work to contend with the brutality of Jonestown begs the question: why are we still reliving this tragedy nearly 35 years later?
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Spiritual-Not-Religious or Just Lazy?
The folks most likely to be alienated by Daniel’s book are, unsurprisingly, the seekers—those who call themselves SBNR, of course, but also those who want religious community, or at least want to want it. For these folks, who may be, as she says, “shopping” for a place to belong, Daniel has absolutely no patience.
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