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A report from India in the wake of new protests. “The emotions are much stronger—the sense of concern, the sense of anxiety, the urgency,” an activist says. “You have your fellow beings torturing themselves… So when this is happening in Tibet, of course people here feel very intense and strongly. But what we can do is very limited.”

Remembering the leader of the “Velvet Revolution” through his writings.

“Prop 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California…”

Is a black person’s life worth anything in America? Not as long as America remains “Exceptional.”

For the poet Javier Sicilia, a grieving father whose son was murdered by thugs last year, the pope’s visit is historic as well. Yet for him, and for those wounded voices he seeks to amplify, the pontiff’s arrival has less to do with pushing back secularism than with long-overdue attention to the ravages of Mexico’s drug wars.

A new book of popular history provides an exhaustive and detailed history of the brutal yet bureaucratic Inquisition, arguing that it helps explain what the world is today.

Watching Higher Ground felt like catching a glimpse of a mythical creature I’d let myself imagine but never thought I’d see in real life. But suddenly there it was, projected on a big screen: sophisticated and complex theological thinking, a female protagonist interested in ideas and books and God, a friendship between two women that has very little to do with men and everything to do with trusting your body and your mind, and the insidious nature of religiously sanctioned sexism and its devastating effects.

Total surrender to heteronomous ethics is unhealthy, period. It may be prescribed by some, but it is also what leads to fundamentalism and religious violence. Gay people know this firsthand: to love oneself as a religious queer person requires interposing one’s own experience between oneself and the text. The text in its traditional reading cannot be correct, because it is incompatible with a notion of a loving God. But that truth is only known by allowing experience, conscience, and discernment to speak.

Remember the movie Joyful Noise, the Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah flick about a small-town gospel choir from the South competing for national recognition?

Jeffress thinks it’s fine to interrogate candidates’ religious beliefs. Indeed there may be times when it is legitimate to ask whether a candidate’s religious positions would have a direct impact on policy. Religious Right activist David Barton has declared that the Bible is opposed to progressive taxation, capital gains taxes, collective bargaining, and the minimum wage. It’s legitimate to ask whether candidates who praise Barton’s work—such as Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich—share those opinions. Similarly, when a presidential candidate like Bachmann calls a Christian Reconstructionist thinker her “mentor,” it is not religious bigotry to ask whether she shares his views about the Constitution and the roles of religion and government in society. But questioning the authenticity or soundness of a candidate’s religious views, for example to have Barton and Glenn Beck rail against what they believe are President Obama’s religious views on the nature of salvation, seems far less appropriate—or useful.