Top Five Toxic Religion Stories of 2014
From religious violence to fear of contagion to economic and racial injustice: taking full measure of what we are up against.
Read Morejustice
Anger, Privilege, and Invisible Injustice: What Cain and Abel Have to Do With Ferguson
How much is our view of justice determined by how we ourselves have been treated?
Read More
The Zimmerman Acquittal: America’s Racist God
God ain’t good all of the time.
Read More
What is Interfaith Cooperation For?
“The central problem interfaith work seeks to solve is this: how are all of us, with our deep differences, to share a nation and a world together? In my view, that is primarily a question of civic space, not political ideology.”
Read More
Marriage Equality: Race, Family Values, and the 99%
According to the US Census, families are becoming less nuclear, headed up by more single parents, childless couples, and LGBT couples with children. Yet family diversity is still only a revelation in the mainstream media, which continues to promote the model of nuclear familyhood, even if it is provisionally represented by elite white gay The Kids Are All Right-style yuppie throwbacks with photogenic children.
Read More
A Report from America’s “Sacrifice Zones”
“I wanted to write a book that looked at what happened when you forced individuals and communities, as well as the environment, to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace. The best way to do this was to go to the nation’s sacrifice zones, those poorest pockets of the country that had been exploited first, to show what happens when you allow the marketplace to rule.”
Read More
Queer Suicide and the Malpractice of “Love”
Violence against queer people runs much deeper than physical bullying, verbal harassment, or even hate-crime murder. It is a violence that takes place at the level of the psyche, the soul—at the very level at which our sense of “self” is constructed within our relation to society.
Read More
Cornel West, Using His Powers for Good
In many ways, The Rich and the Rest of Us is political sustenance for the already converted to liberal and leftist causes. Quoting historian Howard Zinn and looking to the insights of filmmaker Michael Moore probably will not convince many conservatives to rally to the cause—and when Smiley and West rely on Barbara Ehrenreich, they are drawing upon a fellow dissident. Put simply, they are preaching to the choir—but choirs need encouragement too. This is what Smiley and West accomplish: they provide the Occupy generation with a text to rally around.
Read MoreTrayvon Martin and American Exceptionalism
Is a black person’s life worth anything in America? Not as long as America remains “Exceptional.”
Read More
I Was Wrong About Occupy
Thursday morning a dozen occupiers addressed forty or so clergy. We clergy were all somewhat skeptical of the demand for public space. You could hear the ministerial, rabbinical hrumph, hrumph in the room. (Most of us had never occupied Zucotti Park and a downward trend in temperature wasn’t going to improve on that.) But the occupiers edged toward the theological as they articulated a need for communal, inspirational, face-to-face contact in which they could “appear” to one another.
Read More