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Last week there was a flurry of controversy over the public disinviting of gospel star Donnie Mclurkin to a DC celebration of in advance of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. The mayor’s…

Inmates at Guantanamo Bay are hunger striking in an attempt to make their suffering visible while children at a camp in Florida are using the fantasy of hunger as entertainment.

The State Department’s new office for religious engagement should resist the temptation to impose a US model of religious freedom on the world. Church-state separation may work well in the US, but in other contexts, not so much.

“I hope some day I’ll start my blogging again and can speak proudly about my thoughts, my belief or nonbelief, my thoughts about everything like religion, politics and philosophy. And that will only be possible in a truly secular Bangladesh—freedom of speech, equal rights for everyone. I know we have to suffer a lot for this dream. But we have to fight for it.”

There are other senses in which the Muslim world, by and large, has not ‘excelled,’ and for that perhaps we should be grateful, not caustic. For you cannot claim the planet and eat it too. Nothing the Muslim world has accomplished can possibly compare to the harm done by Western technologies and modes of consumption.

Having been taught all their lives that eternal torment is an essential element of Christian belief, my students were, to say the least, surprised at the presence of a universalist strand of thought in the theological tradition—especially coming from such theological heavyweights. What was most surprising to me, though, was their reaction to the teaching: any hint of universal salvation for them negated the whole point of Christianity.

“Religious enthusiasm” or the American apocalyptic can be read as modes of the disaffection of the citizen in a time of political delegitimation. We often see this “religion” taking shape most clearly when we focus all the way down, to the odd hybrid of melancholy and triumphalism in these assertions about Damascus.

No amount of high-end religious training appears to have shaped Governor Jerry Brown’s conscience sufficiently for him to escape the all-too-familiar pattern of selling himself politically.

Every bishop knows he has gay priests in the ranks—pretending otherwise is surely as much of a moral issue as, say, same-sex marriage. Gay priests work in dioceses and religious orders as pastors, teachers, administrators, right-hand men, chaplains, liturgists and preachers. The bishops know this and yet few are able to speak with the kind of candor the pope manages on a daily basis.

Two monastic orders in rural Kentucky, the Sisters of Loretto and Our Lady of Gethsemani, have made news recently for refusing to permit a gas company to install a pipeline across their property.