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Making College Great Again: Evangelical Outsiders in the Age of Trump

…nsisted, “A good, Bible-believing Christian is by nature a good, patriotic American.” This profound sense of defiant loyalty to old-fashioned Americanism helps explain white evangelical enthusiasm for Trump and it has always been embedded deep in the bones of evangelical colleges and universities. For those familiar with this history, recent moves against skeptical faculty members come as no surprise. In 2015, administrator Randy Beckum was chasti…

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A Boundary-Busting Memoir of Love, Mental Illness, and Being Muslim in America

…conscience. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? American Muslims—how could there possibly be any misconceptions? (Sarcasm.) I once read a poll that indicated that whether an American thought Obama was a Muslim was the single greatest predictor of whether she voted for Clinton or Trump. It’s flattering to represent a demented national obsession, but it’s also deeply disturbing. Yes, ISIS is dangerous and, true, Muhammad A…

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Will San Francisco Ban Circumcision?

…ocal politicians and Jewish groups. Jews represent only two percent of the American population, but over sixty percent of American males are circumcised—and Jews are not the only religious group that practices circumcision. American Muslims do as well. Six years ago, in a similar challenge, the Association for Genital Integrity, a Canadian advocacy group, sought public funding to initiate a campaign to outlaw circumcision in Canada. As the Canadia…

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A Pastor Takes on BP in New Orleans

…eep South Center connection was crucial as many of its leaders are African Americans who reside in the New Orleans East neighborhood where the Vietnamese community is found. New Orleans East is a historically and predominantly African-American region—the largest in the city—so the prospects of cooperation between the two communities was vital. “Both communities have been willing to be in a relationship; it’s just that [the] process has needed assi…

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Don’t Worry, Be Happy: How Amazon, Google & Neuroscience Threaten American Buddhism

…s calls “the happiness industry.” Not surprisingly, this is something many Americans are eager to hear: mindfulness can give you sukha vedana, that “happy feeling.” Putting aside the metaphysical question of what in the world we mean by the word “happiness,” there’s the anterior fact that Buddhism isn’t about becoming happy. Happiness and unhappiness are what the Buddha called “Worldly Winds,” like success and failure, gain and loss. Buddhism’s in…

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Entitled And Enraged

…us is the subtle promise that believing in the American Dream makes you an American. Being American, after all, isn’t an ethnicity. Nor is it a matter of subscribing to a particular creed. It isn’t even a matter of being born in a particular geographical location. No less a “real American” than John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. So what is the American identity? If William Cavanaugh is right, it’s a convenient fiction designed to bind…

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Reactions to Biden’s Korean-American Secret Service Agent Expose Christian Nationalism’s Anti-Asian Side

…bove timelines, should shock precisely no one. Christian nationalists, who number at least half of surveyed Americans, believe that America’s exceptional blessings depend on policing spiritual, geopolitical, and racial boundaries. Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, authors of the book Taking America Back for God, found in a recent study that Christian nationalism was usually a “top predictor” of whether a person “find[s] nothing racist about calli…

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This is not a Religion Column: Sarah Palin, American

…t is the principle of the thing with George, and, moreover, being a native American and a veteran of the last war, he has a rather narrow prejudice against being ordered around by guys who talk like they just got off the boat.” Spelvin’s borough of bubbleheads sounds more like Brooklyn than Mayberry. His anxieties, his bigotries—organized labor, immigrants—are those most commonly attendant to urban living. Even his name is a sly joke for working c…

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YouTube Terrorism

…e of duty for the first time in 33 years. Three others perish with him. An American consulate is destroyed. At the same time, an American flag is torched, while another diplomatic post, an embassy, is stormed in a neighboring Arab Muslim country. Days later, further outbursts against American officials and diplomatic sites occur in two other Arab Muslim countries. The headlines are here stripped of their local names, not to protect the innocent bu…

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McCarthy, Born Again and Retooled for Our Time

…bel, it turns out, was responsible for ousting Hargis from the Tulsa-based American Christian College (founded to teach “anti-communist patriotic Americanism”) after Hargis was embroiled in a sex scandal; Hargis was accused of having sex with four male and one female students; the woman, it turned out, married one of the men in a ceremony officiated by Hargis, and the couple found out on their honeymoon that he had had sex with both of them. But i…

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