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Francis Must Make Changes to Have a Real Effect

…s remained fairly steady in recent decades is “the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.,” which has masked “the large number of people who have left the Catholic church.” According to Pew, approximately one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church and 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics. If you were a business losing one-third of your customers, wouldn’t you want to make some changes? Sur…

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Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial clai…

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Gen Z’s Religious Affiliation Stats Are Confusing … But Only When Viewed From a Christian-Centric Perspective

…ay they “believe in God without a doubt,” broken down by generation: Gen Z numbers drop off precipitously since the late nineties. The second showed the number who say they “believe in some higher power.” Here, Gen Z showed an equally precipitous rise, since around 2012. Thompson’s tweet betrays some exasperation with the apparently contradictory results: “Depending on how you ask the question,” he wrote, Gen Z was either “leading a stunning athei…

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How Fitbit Helps a Conservative Evangelical College Monitor Students’ Bodies For Christ

…t the “Aerobics Center,” students filled out a computer card with their ID number, activity number, and the time, intensity, and distance of their workout. The data derived from the cards helped to determine grades. One student who had been forced to enroll in the Pounds Off Program said, “I’m really sad for the school. It has so much potential, so many positive things about it, but you can’t treat people this way… They treat you like you’re not c…

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Single, But Married To Jesus

…other men, whether desirable as a husband or not, stood in the way of the number one relationship. One person I interviewed even had a name for it: “being loosed” from your husband to do the Lord’s work. “Being loosed” could happen because the husband left because the wife was at church too much, they divorced, or the husband died. Others were in horrible marriages, often with physical and emotional abuse involved. Some never married. Yet the chu…

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6 Overlooked Takeaways From a Reviewer of Controversial Texas Textbooks

…es patterns of imbalance, in the textbooks. While these problems spanned a number of religious traditions, I will discuss two representative examples, Christianity and Islam—the two religions about which the most heat was generated in the textbook debate. 5. Pro-Christian, Anti-Muslim Slant As I mentioned in item 1, the curriculum standards (TEKS) promote Christianity over other religions. Sadly, I found a similar pro-Christian slant in many world…

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Republican Scandals Drag Secretive ‘Family’ Into the Big Time

…ne leaders of arming Marxist guerrillas, a story that the mainstream media repeated and repeated and repeated? Was the mainline sidelined by its own ineptitude, by a right-wing conspiracy, by an echoing press or all the above? Even so, why has no one been able to offer an alternative? Do ineptitude, misinformation and narrative constructs still keep us divided? (After in-depth readings of the The Christian Century, I know I owe old white guys a bi…

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Rumors of the Suicide of the Liberal Church Are Exaggerated: A Response to Chris Hedges

…thrates, leftward moves (not least by institutions like UTS) have probably repelled roughly an equal number of people as they have attracted—and meanwhile there has been a net loss of wealthy donors and elite allies. One might expect Hedges to approach this as a trade-off. Indeed it is a sort of tradeoff for him—“a heads you win, tails we lose” variant between selling out and abandoning ship. It is unclear how invested Hedges is in the survival of…

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Religion and Resistance at the New National Museum of African American History and Culture

…he place is brand new! My initial answer is that Christianity has been the dominant voice—not the only voice, but the dominant one. Even in the way we talk about the founding of the nation in general, we’re often tying it to Christian texts and Christian theology. We have to recognize the ways Christianity provided a beautiful language for resistance against slavery, but also the ways a pro-slavery theology reinforced oppression. We also have to a…

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Fox News Controversy on Yoga and White Supremacy Reveals Problem of Yoga Discussion

…themselves in the ocean or leave India; Baba Ramdev (yoga celebrity and entrepreneur) claims that he can cure the disease of homosexuality with yoga; and Sri Sri Ravi Shanker (another spiritual celebrity and entrepreneur) responded to the rise in suicides among debt-ridden Indian farmers with the suggestion that yoga can prevent such suicides—forget attention to the social structures and economic policies responsible for their dire circumstances….

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