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Orthodox Jews Begin to Reckon with Sexual Abuse

By Paul Berger

…ward than ever before. But perhaps more importantly, sexual abuse itself, once taboo, has become an increasingly talked about issue within the Orthodox world. Just a couple of months ago, two of the country’s largest and most influential Orthodox organizations, the Rabbinical Council of America and the Orthodox Union, co-sponsored America’s first National Jewish Child Abuse Prevention Week. There’s nothing to suggest that sexual abuse is any more…

New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

By Austin Dacey

…jections to “blasphemous content.” The IHEU reports being contacted by an increasing number of secularist groups organizing on Facebook, including groups in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Sudan. In all of this, the United States is an anomaly since it rejects even laws against religious hate speech, which were found in 36 of 45 European states in 2011. It’s the best place…

My Business, Myself: Piercing the Corporate Veil

By Howard M. Friedman

…t merely a form of contraception but as “abortifacients” that stop a pregnancy after conception. The lawsuits that have been filed by businesses like Annex challenge the ACA’s contraception mandate on a number of grounds. The most significant challenge invokes the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, claiming that the insurance coverage mandate imposes a substantial burden on the free exercise of religion. Annex Medical lost its claim becaus…

Dear White Evangelicals: A Black Square Ain’t Gonna Cut It

By Jhas Williams

…preachers who never looked like me, and yet somehow each sermon had a tendency to circle back and attack the people who did. Countless sermons juxtaposed the devil’s music—which happened to include only Black forms of artistic expression such as Rap or Hip-Hop—with Country and Top-40 which, we were taught, were wholesome and appropriate. It was never lost on me that Rock n’ Roll was God’s favorite music, that straight blonde hair was His select st…

Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

By Alana Massey

…awfully close to the sacrifices of Jesus. And if that were not enough evidence, the concluding stanza contains the line, “To be alone with me and went up on the tree.” Now, it’s not impossible that Stevens is referring to a regular old meeting between two friends in a regular old tree as having profound personal significance. But if you swing Occam’s Razor in the direction of that song, you’re going to slam right into the cross. The critic conclud…

Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

By Patricia Miller

…anecdotal piece, “there’s more way than one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or who feels less horrible about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal, which had Boston at its epicenter….

8: The Mormon Proposition Gets It Right

By Joanna Brooks

…think that such a campaign could be conducted without significant consequences. One of these consequences is that the Church has now branded itself as the leading anti-gay-rights religion in the country. That’s an expensive bit of turf to hold in an unsustainable legal and political fight. Every day, I read news stories from across the country about Mormons. And let me tell you, this movie alone has gotten ten times more coverage than the Church’…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…lues—raised appreciation for its influence. The upshot? The perception of increased religious influence on American society is just a cataclysm away. Religion’s saliency for political machinations, cultural inspiration, and social movements is a separate reality from the growing number of nones. Both need coverage. But the Gallup data raises questions that I’ve rarely seen addressed in recent years. What does faith look and feel like in flyover co…

The Best the Largest Progressive Jewish Org Could Come Up With?

By Jay Michaelson

…al to do even more. I have no doubt that many consultants and stakeholders wrestled with all the issues I’ve spotted here, and many more, and that this reflects their sincere best efforts to balance multiple constituencies and interests, many of which are at odds with one another. It’s just too bad that, to me at least, what they came up with reflects that….