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Eridiana Rodriguez vanished during her shift cleaning the office building at 2 Rector Street in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District on Tuesday night, July 7. After four days, one hundred police scoured the building and discovered the body of this mother of three the following Saturday, bound with tape and stuffed into an air duct on the 12th floor, which was under construction and had restricted access.

During the election campaign in 2008 it was clear some people on the political Right were becoming agitated about the potential for a Black man backed by liberals to become the next President of the United States.

Bible scholar Michael Coogan’s new book examines the dangers associated with the biblical concept of chosenness, which has its fingerprints on everything from the genocidal treatment of indigenous peoples to the idea that women, when thought by believers to have been created as mere vessels for reproduction, may be treated in the manner of brood cattle.

The men who created the New Right chose the Republican Party as the party to attach themselves to, even if they didn’t agree with all of the GOP’s ideas, melding conservatives with the Christian Right.

If history is any guide, lax oversight and secrecy are a recipe for abusive political intelligence gathering by the FBI. Pervasive official secrecy continues to threaten our national values under the Obama administration, in spite of a declared willingness to increase transparency.

Teaching made me aware of how uncomfortable people in the United States are about death—and how their religious practices contribute to this discomfort. Since my terminal diagnosis I’ve found that our problem concerns the most central question we ask about religion.

A word of advice to activists and people praying at mosques. If a guy offers you a free stinger missile, he’s probably an informer. If he offers you free IEDs, he’s probably an informer. If he asks you to pledge an oath to his foreign terrorist organization, he’s also probably a government spy.