The First Amendment Defense Act. It’s a name that Big Brother would be proud of, seemingly plucked from the bowels of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984.”
The Senate bill is not the bulwark its name suggests but the latest salvo in the ongoing attempt to redefine religious freedom as religious privilege. It does nothing to defend the First Amendment; in fact, it violates it.....

It might seem odd for a constitutional attorney to point out that, other than the freedom of thought, all our rights can and should be curtailed in certain circumstances. But it’s true. Even the free exercise of religion can be limited. Look closely at the language and the amendment makes this clear. The free exercise clause prevents the government from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion; it does not prevent the government from regulating conduct that might be religiously motivated.

For believers, this means that your right to believe cannot be impinged in any way, but your right to act on those beliefs can.

Q) What can you tell us about Lemaître’s approach to the intersection of science and faith, and what can we learn from it nearly a century later?

A) His conception of the relationship of science and faith was rather circumspect, carefully delineating their roles as ways of knowing. Science for him was the methodology for understanding the physical cosmos; revealed religion taught truths important for salvation. He was quite content to observe that the findings of science were in no way discordant with scriptural revelation, and vice versa, but neither should overreach. If Lemaître has a lesson for the science-faith discourse today, that would probably be it.

Fast-forward three years, and that network includes 10 black churches, which he predicts will double this year as more congregations start gardens on their properties. And the food he once gave away is now sold by churches, with any profits from the farm produce sales going back into the network.

"Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal," Randa Jarrar wrote on Twitter, according to the Fresno Bee.

Former first lady Barbara Bush said that Hurricane Katrina refugees being housed in the Houston Astrodome were "underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

As FEDERAL investigators sift through the evidence of Donald Trump's criminal history seized from his lawyer's office, Trump and fellow Republicans are racing to pull off what could be remembered as their last big score: Destroying what's left of the social safety net to pay for billionaire tax cuts and Pentagon boondoggles....

Surveys show that these patronizing and racially coded claims have far less credibility with the public then they did 20 years ago. But it will take protests, not polls, to stop Trump and his gang of thieves from getting away with this historic attack

Donald Trump is not a Christian, but he understands what white Protestants long for, says historian Matthew Bowman, author of Christian: The Politics of a Word in America, just out from Harvard University Press....

So I was interested in documenting the multiplicity of voices, and demonstrating that “Christian” is a contested concept. But also I wanted to look at how it was the religious right became so powerful.

We are living in times that call for prophetic imagination and a courageous willingness to “practice the world we wish to see,” as adrienne maree brown says in Emergent Strategy. These times also call for honest reflection on the ways we as white folk participate in the perpetuation of racism and can repent, literally to go back and walk a different way.

In that spirit, SURJ-Faith is organizing a campaign that asks faith/spiritual communities to examine our relationship to policing and police violence. This campaign is an act of accountability to people of color who are asking white people to join them in imagining and taking action toward a world without policing, and is also aligned with the Vision for Black Lives.

For many years starting at around the time of the 9-11 terror attacks, I referred to myself a “moderate Muslim.” I used the term on my Facebook profile and pronounced it if asked about my religious beliefs.....

Then, just as I was abandoning the religion I’d known my whole life, I had my first encounter with spiritual Islam.....

Islam came alive. It wasn’t a rigid, dogmatic system of rituals, dress codes and obligations, but a direct experience of Divine Compassion and Mercy. It wasn’t a religion of fear, but a tender, beautiful path toward Unconditional Love. Rather than a label or identity, it was a state of being in surrender to the natural flow of the Divine Reality, or Allah.

What if we always realized the importance of experiencing hardships and making mistakes, instead of gaining that insight only after some time has passed? What if we allow ourselves to go through a difficult period of our lives while keeping in mind that someday, we might be grateful that it happened?.....

This is where tawakkul (faith and trust in God) comes in.

The blue Muslim wave: American Muslims launch political campaigns, hope to deliver ‘sweet justice’ to Trump
More than 90 American Muslims, nearly all of them Democrats, are running for public office across the country this year. Many are young and politically inexperienced, and most are long shots. But they represent a collective gamble: that voters are so disgusted by America’s least popular president on record that they’re willing to elect members of America’s least popular religious minority group.