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Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

…ith formal, centralized leadership. With access to drug money, oil wealth, cheap weapons, and consumer-grade digital toys, they don’t have to worry that 93% of people in the Muslim world still refuse to condone the 9/11 attacks. No one can control them: not their communities, their politicians, their leading clerics, nor even their ostensible figurehead, bin Laden himself. When forced out of one area, the fighters re-create another in their own im…

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The Quixotic Task of Debunking David Barton

…futations of Barton’s bogus empiricism.  I’ve considered these questions a number of times recently in observing historians struggling to deal with the popularity of figures such as David Barton, who bowdlerize history but get the kind of attention few actual historians receive for their work.  To What Effect? These debates go back a long way. When I was in college at a Baptist denominational school in Oklahoma, the biology professor, a man about…

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My Womb for His Purposes: The Perils of Unassisted Childbirth in the Quiverfull Movement

…reme version of the practice taught by Carol Balizet, head of the obscure, Tampa, Florida-based Home in Zion Ministries, that is condemned even by fellow unassisted childbirthers. Balizet, a former nurse and the author of a number of books on Christian home-living, motherhood, and home birthing, represents a fringe expression of the Quiverfull suspicion of mainstream, institutional experts. She condemns banks, public schools, “statist” government,…

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Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

…ader. What was the culture of the prison? At night, there was one guard for 800 prisoners. In the Rio prison system there’s no real government presence; state control in the prisons is just a façade. The prison gangs are the most powerful presence, but the church exerts a strong influence too. There were about 400 inmates in the gang camp inside the prison, and 40 to 50 in the church camp. The rest were neutral people who kept to themselves in the…

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Too Hot for Shul: Rabbis Seek Healthy Israel Dialogue After Gaza

…ger chilling effect in the American Jewish world, yes; I’ve gotten so many phone calls and voicemails [from people] who have had something happen to them—this summer I do believe it has gone off the rails.” Yet, Kleinbaum said, “I do think my job is to create a Jewish space in which this discussion can take place without saying this person is not a good Jew and another is a good Jew. That, I think, is a reachable goal for my community.” Many rabbi…

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Why Crux‘s Knights of Columbus “Partnership” is Problematic

…mpaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. In 2005, they printed 800,000 postcards in Canada “in a campaign that [argued] that the redefinition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would promote pedophilia, pornography and unsafe sex.” As Marianne Duddy-Burke of the LGBTQ Catholic organization Dignity USA commented in a press release, “The Knights are deeply invested in advancing a particular brand of Catholicism, and I am con…

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A Muslim Reflects on Christian Theologian (and UCLA Coach) John Wooden

…er of the amazing things about him. He was approachable, answering his own phone and mail, meeting with complete nobodies like me. I thanked him for the basketball lessons that I had learned from him, but more importantly for the life lessons. His beloved wife Nellie had passed away in 1985 after 53 years of marriage, and my wife had died suddenly in 1992. Coach gave me a powerful model for dealing with that loss, a reminder that those we loved we…

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Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

…tian radical A. J. Muste calling Moses the organizer of “Brickmakers Union Number 1” and a pacifist Russian rabbi named Tamaret—wove them all into a new Telling of the tale of freedom. In that Telling, the then ongoing, even now unfinished, struggle of Black America for freedom was interwoven with the ancient story of the Israelites’ struggle to end their slavery under Pharaoh. Where the old Haggadah had what seemed to me a silly argument about ho…

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Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

…w dozen yards of the riders and take pictures of the scene with their cell phone cameras. Traffic on College Avenue begins to pick up. “You’re protesting God!” a motorist hollers when he catches sight of one of the Soulforce banners. Finally a slender young man wearing a “CBC Soccer” jacket ventures all the way to the sidewalk. “I just kind of want to show them I care,” says Jonathan Jacobs, a junior at the college. Jacobs, whose family moved to C…

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Hajj Journal: M & M

…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…

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