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Diplomatic Suckerhood: Why Israel Is Fighting Toward its Own Demise

By Ira Chernus

…rs claim to have found a silver lining: “People who were exposed to a scenario emphasizing the price Israel might have to pay for allowing the conflict to continue were more willing to accept new information and compromise, in comparison to those exposed to a scenario based on the fruits of peace.” Logically, then, Israeli leaders should tell their voters that they stand to lose plenty if they don’t support compromises for peace. But here’s the ru…

The Sacred and the Dead: Truckin’ as a New American Pilgrimage

By Varun Soni

…the Grateful Dead collectively formed an intentionally itinerant community numbering in the tens of thousands, with their own customs, vernacular, art, and economy. In his explanation of the lure of the Grateful Dead to thousands of Deadheads around the country, Garcia ruminated, “maybe we’re just one of the last adventures in America.” Indeed, the promise of a great American adventure animated Deadheads to undertake an annual pilgrimage across th…

Sex and the Chosen People: Be Fruitful and Multiply, Etc.

By Mandy Van Deven

…of innovative thinking about gender, sex, and sexuality, who could marry a number of different lenses to create something new. It’s not a strictly academic work by any means; it’s meant to be accessible to people with all sorts of (and no) Jewish backgrounds—hence the glossary in the back. But yeah, there are footnotes. For someone not well-versed in Jewish feminist theory, how transgressive or radical are these essays? Some of them push the envel…

Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

By Joseph Laycock

…y research I became convinced that this is a sizable community worthy of serious study. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? By studying vampires, we study ourselves. I am concerned that despite the best intention of many scholars, the term “new religious movement” (a label that has been applied to vampires) carries with it the subtext that a group is totally “other.” While it may be comforting to think that we are totally diff…

‘Pro-Life’ Theater, Open White Nationalism, and Virility Fear — Day 3 of NatCon

By Annika Brockschmidt and Ben Lorber

…using universities to train public service administrators to serve as a patriotic bureaucratic elite. National conservatives “only have ourselves to blame,” Pappin explains, if they find themselves ill-equipped to actually staff state institutions to achieve their goals (as was the case in the first Trump presidency). If, in the future, the US “were able to exercise power for a sustained period of time,” national conservatives would need to educat…

American Christianity Is Changing Fast: Five Stories to Watch in 2016

By Richard Flory

…ken a much more adversarial stance to LGBT acceptance. However, increasing numbers of evangelical churches are accepting LGBT individuals as members. This development is not without its opponents, however. Many evangelical organizations—most significantly colleges, universities and seminaries—are mobilizing to retain their “religious right” to discriminate against LGBT individuals. More than 30 evangelical higher education institutions have petiti…

Death With Dignity: Combatting Religious Opposition to Physician-Assisted Suicide

By Krista Kapralos

…pport group in the Seattle area, where they lived. They watched others deteriorate. “We knew it would be a slow, painful death,” Nancy Niedzielski said. In 1997, Oregon voters approved the Death with Dignity Act, which allows terminally ill people to ask their doctors for a prescription for lethal drugs. When his pain intensified, Randy Niedzielski said he wanted to move to Oregon, where he could end his own life, he told his wife, in a controlled…

New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…gay or lesbian relationships are morally acceptable. Among Catholics, that number jumps to 66%. Protestants still lag behind, but 41% say gay and lesbian relationships are moral. Resorting to pseudo-science is the last gasp of anti-gay groups and they will certainly tout this study, ﬂaws and all, as proof that same-sex couples make awful parents and raise terribly troubled kids. Again, it’s no shock – the religious right wing is always quick to tw…

U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…hurch. One could argue, therefore, that the lack of alignment between the priorities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Francis wasn’t a willful rejection of the pope’s agenda, but more of a wait-and-see attitude of exactly what that agenda was and how it could be implemented in concrete detail. But the jig is up. Its been nearly three years. The pope has clearly laid out his priorities, first in Laudato si and then during his recent t…

When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

By Colin Chapell

…ldview. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, I had not seen many scholars seriously examine the ways in which faith influenced gender construction. There are important works on how faith had an impact on the roles that men and women could do, on the level of institutional authority they could assume, but little had been done on how masculinity and femininity were actually thought of, and how theology changed these ideals. What I wanted to do was es…