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If the Obama Administration sticks with Bush’s faith-based initiatives they would do well to avoid the numerous mistakes and predilection for corruption that haunted the Bush version.

While the LDS Church’s leadership role in the passage of Proposition 8 may have been a surprising new direction for observers here in the United States, the Church has been instrumental in the organization of a world-spanning alliance of right-wing Christians and Muslims.

Barack Obama tried to run a color-blind campaign, and he won. But don’t believe the hype: an Obama victory doesn’t mean an end to racism in our culture, or that we should blithely forget the history of racial injustice.

In the midst of a global financial crisis one sector has yet to suffer the fate of the rest. Islamic finance, or Sharia-compliant banking, offers strict moral guidelines for dealing with money. Trading debt and risky speculation are off-limits, as is investment in immoral enterprises like gambling, prostitution, and war profiteering. It might be time to get the muftis on the phone.

More than Tupac or Marilyn or Di or Kurt or Jimi, the cult of Elvis transcends labels like industry or entertainment; it is worthy of church, but the spirit of Elvis cannot be institutionalized…

The United States has exported its contradictory and confusing HIV prevention strategy to Africa: Abstain, Be Faithful, Condoms (ABC). Herewith a modest proposal to reconcile Christianity, identity, and HIV prevention…

While both progressives and conservatives seek confirmation of their politics in the bible, how does one derive a political outlook from a text with few parallels to the political context in which we live? In other words, how do you ask “What would Jesus do?” when the one thing Jesus couldn’t do was vote?

Did Lofton’s critique go far enough? Was it too measured and neutral? Scholar Mark Hulsether writes that “given the issues at stake in the current election and the huge gap in scholarly persuasiveness between some articulations of Christianity and others, this is a place where my own inclination would be to draw more critics out of the shadows and to give them space to twist their knives harder.”

Amid new rumors of man and dinosaur coexistence, the Texas Board of Education will be debating the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution and deciding whether to force religion into science class.

Small Town Spirituality, Big City Hate: For those with ears to hear it, Sarah Palin’s speeches echoed the work of Westbrook Pegler, a mid-century Rush Limbaugh, and then some….