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It’s simpler to assume that religion and feminism are at odds; that religion is simply the provenance of those who use tools like pro-life politics to fight feminist agendas. It’s much more complicated to think of religion as both resource and adversary in the political struggles that feminists face.

In the fall of 2009 I visited eight cities in China. I discussed Marxist understanding of religion, homosexuality, the persistence of popular religiosity, freedom of research, and approaches to the study of religion with Chinese colleagues in a carefree and open atmosphere. The Chinese colleagues followed closely what was happening outside and asked me about the schism within the Anglican Communion over the issue of homosexuality. I found many new books on religion by Chinese scholars and translations of Western religious texts selling in local bookstores. I offered lectures on feminist theology in top universities and a Protestant seminary. Religion was no longer a taboo subject. These kinds of exchanges would have been unimaginable twenty years ago.

Packed with conspiracy theories, while claiming to be about sustainability.

I just returned from watching 2016: Obama’s America, arch-conservative Dinesh D’Souza’s election-year documentary, which I went to because I wanted to see it at our former church, a central Nebraska Salvation Army congregation’s “Teen Night.”

The church, in its ignorance of and hostility to evolution, is passing up one of its greatest opportunities to apprehend the very God it claims to represent. This irony is due to a terrible case of what may be called “small-god-ism” and is, unfortunately, encouraged by much popular theology. This theology makes claims about scripture and church practice that reduce God to a cheerleader, or a cosmic vending machine, or some domesticated and pale image of our own confused selves.

The film admired by Jared Loughner defies categorization but ultimately offers a dark vision.

Part of the scandal of American Christianity is that statistically the U.S. is the most Christian country in the world, and yet as a country we have the greatest income inequality in the world. And as a country we are uncritically committed not simply to being the most powerful nation in the world militarily, but to being as militarily powerful as the rest of the world combined.

Recently, on The Huffington Post, Rev. Chellew-Hodge suggested that gays and lesbians should never argue Scripture—in particular, the half dozen “clobber verses” that some people interpret against gays. Why? Because nobody wins, everyone’s opinion hardens, and we talk past each other, because gays and lesbians are usually not biblical literalists, while our opponents usually are. Chellew-Hodge’s suggestion sounds wise, but I want to respectfully disagree with it.

Recent studies of yoga reveal the formative influence of (wait for it) Buddhism, Jainism, Sufism, television, military calisthenics, Swedish gymnastics and the YMCA, as well as of radical Hindu nationalism, upon today’s postural yoga practice. There is no doubt that the Vedas, Upanishads, and folk traditions of India have been formative toward yoga: yoga is almost inseparable from them. Nevertheless to assert that yoga is essentially and primarily a Hindu practice means to ignore millennia of generative influence from other quarters. Worse still, it means to step blindly into a political fight for the heart of India that has simmered for over two hundred years.

Pastor claims Loughner was a campaign worker for Giffords and that gun control causes genocide.