The Rev. William J. Barber II, architect of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and leader of the resurgent Poor People’s Campaign, has won a MacArthur “genius” award....

Barber was unavailable for comment on Thursday (Oct. 4) according to a spokesperson, because he was arrested in Chicago while participating in a “Fight for $15” rally convened by fast food and other workers demanding higher wages and the right to unionize.

“Merging moral and activist traditions, Barber is providing a faith-based framework for action that strengthens civic engagement and inspires the country to imagine a more humane society,” the MacArthur Foundation said of Barber. As one of 25 recipients of the so-called genius award, Barber will receive a grant of $625,000 paid over five years.

AS THIS article is being written, millions desperately await the decision of a handful of wealthy white senators over whether to send to the Supreme Court a man accused by three different women of sexual assault.
Regardless of whether Brett Kavanaugh is successfully rammed through the confirmation process by hateful politicians hiding behind a sham FBI investigation, a few important things have become clear.
The first is that sexual assault has become and will continue to be a defining political issue in the Donald Trump era. The second is that survivor-led protest has the potential to be a powerful radicalizing force in this deeply sexist society, and the building and development of this movement should be a high priority for the growing socialist movement.

The thesis of the article is simply this: Muslims claim to be victims of Islamophobia and feel offended when Islam is criticized in the West, but the very book they hold sacred (Quran) contains much more hate-speech against non-believers....

Critiquing any ideology or a certain set of beliefs, no matter how sacred they are held, should neither be legally prohibited nor discouraged since that is how humankind progresses. After all, the Quranic doctrine of Jesus not being God but rather a pious messenger of God might seem very offensive to some Christians, too!..

Critiquing any ideology or a certain set of beliefs, no matter how sacred they are held, should neither be legally prohibited nor discouraged since that is how humankind progresses. After all, the Quranic doctrine of Jesus not being God but rather a pious messenger of God might seem very offensive to some Christians, too!

THE POLITICAL landscape in Quebec changed radically last Monday for the first time since 1972. A radical left-wing party emerged as an unavoidable political force, a new right-wing populist party took power, and the old mainstream parties sustained historical defeats....


ON THE other side of the spectrum, Québec Solidaire (QS), a broad-left party with radical roots, won some surprising victories.
Winning in 10 ridings, or districts, QS is now the largest left-wing party in the legislative assembly, passing its nationalist rival, the Parti Québécois. For the first time in its history, QS also managed to win seats outside of the Montreal region.

I wish I had grown up with sisters. Maybe then I wouldn’t have felt so blindsided by the conversations about sexual violence emerging across the world right now. I’m ashamed to say that I have been completely oblivious, even about the women with whom I am especially close.
That I am only now realizing the truth, thanks to the #MeToo movement and, most recently, the Kavanaugh hearings speaks to my own male privilege. I grew up with three brothers, and we hardly ever talked about sexual violence. I can’t recall a single occasion where my brothers or I refrained from doing something because we worried that our gender made us targets.

More than 20 years ago, when Layli Miller-Muro was still in law school, her first immigration client was a Muslim woman from Togo who sought asylum in the United States to avoid a forced marriage and female genital mutilation. Instead, the woman, Fauziya Kassindja, spent 17 months in detention before the young law student intervened.
In 1996 the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals granted Kassindja asylum and her case set a precedent establishing gender-based violence as grounds for asylum.
It also changed the course of Miller-Muro’s legal career. After receiving her J.D. from American University in 1996, the following year she created the Tahirih Justice Center, a national nonprofit organization that ever since has worked on behalf of women and girls who are fleeing gender-based violence and seeking asylum in the United States.

Confidence in Pope Francis’ handling of the child sex abuse scandal within the Catholic Church has dropped dramatically among American Catholics in recent months, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.
The report, released Tuesday (Oct. 2), shows that only 3 in 10 Catholic adults (31 percent) say Francis is doing an “excellent” or a “good” job addressing the ongoing child sex abuse crisis. That number is down 24 points since Pew asked the question in 2015, and 14 points from January of this year.

The Brett Kavanaugh crisis has been a crucible for questions about sexual behavior and women’s equality. But Thursday’s drama on Capitol Hill, and evangelical Christians’ responses to it, also reveal much about the racial problem at the heart of white conservative Christian America....

“It’s just a shame that a person like Judge Kavanaugh, who has a stellar record, that somebody can bring something up that he did when he was a teenager close to 40 years ago. That’s not relevant,” Graham told the Christian Broadcasting Network.
Boys will be boys, as the saying goes....

White conservative Christian preachers such as Franklin Graham might pause to wrestle with the uneven racial histories that portray young black boys (and girls) as responsible for a myriad of social problems, even when they are innocent.
In this country, in short, black boys can never simply be “boys.”