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Was the former governor simply seeking a laugh or unwittingly invoking the Crusades?

Bishops launch ‘fortnight’ of prayer and p.r. as San Francisco’s LGBT Film Festival opens.

I wanted to think about how we mediate the past for children—and how we tell stories about children who lived in the past. Writing about religion, memory, and children’s literature became my way of doing that.

As I write this piece, 119 Tibetans have set themselves on fire, choosing to end their lives to further the cause of the Tibetan people. Tupten Ngödrup, a former monk and the first Tibetan to immolate, took his own life in India in 1998. The next such act would not take place until 2009…

As a theologian—or as I like to say, a Christian intellectual—there comes a point when the words you write crowd into the life you live and demand that you reorganize your space or you will live in a mess. My sense is that many of us are experiencing a similar overcrowding. A world controlled by banking interests, multinational corporations, and a very powerful extremely wealthy few is an intolerable situation, and governments that love them and protect them more than the people will have to be reminded that some of us will make demands in the name of our God.

To these guys, the idea of women working outside the home is destroying American culture. They’re saying that a society in which a majority of women support their families cannot possibly be compatible with a strong, traditional, vibrant society. Yet we need only look to the traditional Jewish culture of Eastern Europe of less than two centuries ago in order to find an example that gives the lie to conservative handwringing over women’s work.

Once you produce garbage, by your own logic we have the right to recycle what you have wasted all humanity’s energy to produce (in Man of Steel, Krypton goes to hell literally because they fracked their planet to death); you could say, then, that they turned their planet into a bomb and blew themselves up. How do we make sense of this otherwise? So I suggest Man of Steel as an exercise in the language of racism, the politics of dispossession, and the danger of too much power.

But for those who are religious—and out and active in their faith communities—great gains have been made.

A new book on ‘only children’ adds an interesting dimension to the politics of making babies.