Resistance Strategies

Performance artist or man of God? Agitator or politician? The Church of Life After Shopping’s Reverend Billy has a choir and a congregation like a preacher—does he have to be a “real” clergyman to minister to the masses?

Since the successful street demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999, police and federal agencies have relied on aggressive and unconstitutional tactics to disperse, disrupt, and dissuade popular protest. Last week, the ACLU of Colorado, and attorneys from the NLG People’s Law Project, filed suit on behalf of bystanders, activists, and legal observers to hold Denver accountable for an arbitrary roundup during the 2008 DNC.

Wendy Gonaver’s lessons on the American Constitution may soon include her own story: the refusal to sign a loyalty oath designed to root out communists in public jobs whose effect is to weed out religious believers, particularly Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Hozan Alan Senauke talks about socially engaged Buddhism, weapons of mass redemption, and “just sitting down” as a radical act.

In light of a recent finding that evangelical Christians are more likely, statistically, to support the use of torture, a scholar proposes an approach to nonviolence based on the teaching of Christianity’s first theologian.

When you consider the Pope on condoms, a hospital’s failure to follow simple precautions, and the fading of activism, we’re still coming up short in the fight against AIDS. Still, even at the intersection of AIDS and religion, the news ain’t all bad.

A young, lesbian, Catholic progressive responds to Frances Kissling on the question of old-school ideas and strategies versus the brave new world of boundary-busting and online activism.

President Obama got his campaign slogan from Cesar Chavez, but on this 16th anniversary of the great labor leader’s death we still have no national holiday to commemorate his legacy.

Mark Silk’s recent analysis of the rift between the “prophets” and the “priests” of the left hinges on the assumption that reaching out to centrist evangelicals will help Democrats. But will it?

We have failed, as a society—for millennia—to ascribe worth to the one sustaining gift of the universe that we touch and feel every day: the earth itself. Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace, has an Earth Day message about ecology, community, and spirit.