If you’re secular or a progressive religious person, you might be thinking “yes”—especially in view of a high-profile case that will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday (Dec. 5). Masterpiece Cakeshop vs. Colorado Civil Rights Commission pits the anti-gay-marriage beliefs of a cake baker against the rights of a same-sex couple to live and marry free of discrimination.....

Is this the point we’ve reached? Is it time for Americans to elect politicians and shape a judiciary with a much more limited conception of religious freedom?

No

THE TERRIFIC podcast Citations Needed, hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, call it "lotteryism"--the grotesque process where local and state governments bid for Fortune 500 companies by offering billions of dollars in tax breaks in the hopes that they will relocate to their cities. The most high-profile example of this right now is, of course, Amazon. Politicians across the country are offering absurd packages to attract the new "Amazon HQ2" headquarters. These enticements will gut services for those who depend on public schools, hospitals, public transportation and basic infrastructure. This is not to say that Amazon won't bring jobs to these cities. It is making promises of thousands of permanent hires. But the pound of flesh being offered for these jobs is frightening.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is warning that after Republicans cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans, their next move is going to be to attack Social Security and Medicare.

AFTER WOMEN stepped forward to tell their stories of how they had been sexually abused and harassed by members of Congress, it didn't take long for political leaders from both sides of the aisle to talk about how serious this all was.....

Confidentiality agreements that prevent women from speaking in public, a process that bars women from getting co-workers to corroborate evidence, secret settlements paid out of the federal treasury--all are part of a process where sexual assault claims never see the light of day, remaining confined to a rigged in-house system, with rules that Congress made up for itself.

The church covenant makes it clear: The congregation is to be “a safe haven, free from the fear of judgment, where wounds are healed, differences are celebrated and inclusivity is intentional.”.........

This congregation of 300 members has become the first church in Raleigh to convert part of its space into a bedroom.

“I don’t know any mainstream scholar who doubts the historicity of Jesus,” said Eric Meyers, an archaeologist and emeritus professor in Judaic studies at Duke University. “The details have been debated for centuries, but no one who is serious doubts that he’s a historical figure.”......

I heard much the same from Byron McCane, an archaeologist and history professor at Florida Atlantic University. “I can think of no other example who fits into their time and place so well but people say doesn’t exist,” he said.

Scholars who study Jesus divide into two opposing camps separated by a very bright line: those who believe the wonder-working Jesus of the Gospels is the real Jesus, and those who think the real Jesus—the man who inspired the myth—hides below the surface of the Gospels and must be revealed by historical research and literary analysis. Both camps claim archaeology as their ally, leading to some fractious debates and strange bedfellows.

The Big Bang hypothesis is widely known in popular thought as the best explanation for how the universe came to be. However, very few people know that a Catholic priest formulated this theory in the late 1920s. Reverend Monsignor Georges Lemaître, a Belgian scientist, challenged the conventional thinking of his colleagues, including Albert Einstein, and rejected the static universe hypothesis for a dynamic model. In the course of carrying out his research, he confronted illogical thinking that pitted faith against reason, and science against the Church. His legacy extends beyond cosmology, to the nature of truth itself

Father Lemaître's intellectual background was unique. His education was a synthesis of the classics, philosophy and theology along with engineering, mathematics and physics. Perhaps this powerful combination is what allowed his mind to formulate a concept as abstract and significant as the primeval atom hypothesis — his term for what we now colloquially refer to as the Big Bang

Calling on the federal government to bring its "full resources to bear" on the crisis in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.-I) unveiled a $146 billion recovery package for the U.S. territories on Tuesday, two months after Hurricane Maria left destruction across the islands.
Sanders and the Democratic co-sponsors of the new bill argue it is necessary to treat the recovery as the emergency it is, but that rebuilding the islands' battered infrastructure should not mean simply returning to things as they were.

So The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (W.W. Norton and Company), by Linda Gordon, a professor of history at New York University, is a late addition to a very crowded shelf. The book makes its contribution chiefly as a work of synthesis; its endnotes point, for the most part, to earlier studies rather than primary sources.