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Dreaming Cyborg Dreams: Virtual Identity and Religious Experience

…depends on the extent that one’s religious worldview is imported into the online world. Second Life In the online world of Second Life, “residents” design their own avatars and engage in unscripted encounters, making real religious dialogue a possibility. Rita King (and her avatar Eureka Dejavu), engaged in some tough discussions about cultural differences with Muslims, as reported in Dispatches From the Imagination Age. Eureka describes a time w…

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The Best Books Media of 2008

…ennie Chancey and Stacy McDonald (Vision Forum) was published at the end of 2007, I’m sneaking it in to my 2008 list as a text that’s emblematic of much of my reading this past year as I finished my research and writing on the self-described Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements. Chancey and McDonald are names little-known in mainstream culture, but within the growing world of “complementarian” Christianity which emphasizes “biblical” manh…

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Is Joel Osteen, Success Mag Cover Boy, Really “God’s Best”?

…n selfish, slow to help the poor and needy around me, hesitant to give from my own abundance. If Joel Osteen is honest, he would see that while he is indeed living man’s best—and is a role model for worldly success—his ministry is woefully lacking when measured against “God’s best.”…

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Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

…esire to access them. The ease with which a Muslim can now read and search online databases of the hadith (sayings and deeds of Muhammad) has made some Muslim scholars nervous. The University of Southern California offers a searchable online hadith collection, in English, which is prefaced by a “warning” issued “especially for Muslims.” The warning explains that the early scholars of hadith were experts in the “critical science of collecting and e…

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A Devil’s Dozen of the Best ‘New Religion Journalism’ Books of the Decade

…e who has been published in the last several years can tell you that around 2015 something different and uglier seemed to emerge online. Suddenly the campaign (and subsequent election) of Donald Trump unleashed floodgates of antisemitism that many liberals had long assumed had disappeared. Pernicious antisemitic myths that had long been outside the pale of mainstream discourse were suddenly discussed openly by figures like Trump adviser Stephen Ba…

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Taking Evangelical Support of Israel at Face Value Is a Terrible Idea: A Response

…istian Zionism, and its usually concomitant apocalypticism, of “paranoia.” Best even dismissed prominent evangelical author and pastor John Hagee’s view that God ostensibly used Hitler to forward his divine plan of gathering the Jews in Israel as mere “dabbling in anti-Semitism.” As I argued in a rebuttal likewise published by The Forward, Best’s breezy, dismissive whitewashing of the more unseemly aspects of evangelicals’ support for (the most ag…

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Saipov Wasn’t a “Member” of ISIS, But That Misses the Point

…e from all over the world to Syria and Iraq during the movement’s heyday in 2015 and 2016. But a much larger group were also involved, though primarily on line, in the animated chats of the online social networks and as readers of the online ISIS literature. This online network constituted a separate movement. In the Twitter chats they often would call themselves baqiyah, a term that means something that survives or endures, and in this case refer…

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Will God-Gaming Alter the Bible?

…, if competition is a core feature of games, who is competing in The Bible Online, and in what way? How are points amassed, and do these “points” have any religious significance beyond the game? What of the “RTS” (real-time strategy) component of The Bible Online and its communal play feature? Will everyone play as Abraham at the same time? Or will one player get to take on this role while others follow him? And what performative act, faithful or…

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Republican Scandals Drag Secretive ‘Family’ Into the Big Time

…agreement. Coe makes the same point, arguing that among the leaders of the 20th century who best understood what he views as the New Testament’s primary message of unity were Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Evil men, he’ll add when pressed, but effective! In a clip from a sermon to evangelical leaders you can see online via NBC News, Coe offers, as an example of a friendship to be emulated, that of Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler. “Just a metaphor,” says…

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Pornography’s Dirty Little Secret: What We Say vs. What We Do

…word searches, one caveat is important to add. In part, keyword search rates reflect the language used when porn content is tagged in the first place. Keywording practices impact the search options available to end-users. This, in turn, skews the data. That said, 20-something online porn users are more likely to seek out the term stepmom; by age 55 to 64, the term massage jumps to number one. ### Excerpted from The Pornography Industry: What Every…

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