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RDBook: There is Nothing New About the New Atheism

…lorification of man on the mind. Christopher Lasch’s question is as urgent today as it was when he posed it 18 years ago in his book The True and Only Heaven How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once in for all? Reitan raises in separate chapters the key arguments that atheists have used or attacked, including theories of…

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

…to produce a child? Well, of course, there are so many more possibilities today in terms reproductive technology than the Torah, Talmud, or our medieval and early modern codes could have imagined! Certainly, some things possible in our world had been sufficiently anticipated by earlier Jews that we have a basis for discussion; there were forms of birth control mentioned in the Talmud, for example. And there are even intimations of the questions r…

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Escape From Manhattan: Tech, Tragedy and Storytelling in Sandy’s Wake

…cient for most people in their contemplation of supernatural other-spaces, today more and more people rely upon mediated worlds for this sense of voluntary displacement. So to see Manhattan itself go belly-up after the storm, to watch how carnal we become when met with loss of power, has been a sobering and a saddening experience. All of this has made me think more squarely about how inured we have become to screens as the mediator of our imaginat…

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Satanic or Systemic? Promise Keepers Are Back and Looking to End Racism Via ‘Trickle-Down Racial Reconciliation’

…y unchanged since the height of Promise Keeper popularity. Fast forward to today and Promise Keepers are inhabiting a new landscape dominated by social media, hyper-partisanship, and balkanized media outlets that keep Americans of every background in cocoons of confirmation bias. Whereas in the ‘90s Promise Keepers were at the forefront of articulating what would become a 21st century American Christian masculinity, they’re now just one of many as…

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Swimming Against the Tide: Religious (Non) Affiliation Might Not Mean What You Think It Means

…Such changes in declared identification have huge implications for society today. And yet the import and meaning of these changes are likely more nuanced than how they often are portrayed. A mouse pad decorated with a school of ancient “ichthus” Christian symbols (and a contemporary “evangellyfish” headed in the opposite direction). Image via Zazzle.com. A few examples: Self-reported church attendance is roughly the same today as in the 1940’s and…

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Dilemmas of American Empire: Can Obama Pull Off a Game-Changer in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan?

…ary bases in the Green Zone, the dramatically named Forward Operating Base Freedom. But two weeks later the administration announced its plan to keep indefinitely the entire Camp Victory complex, which has five large bases in Baghdad, and Camp Prosperity and Camp Union III, which are located near the new American Embassy in the Green Zone. There are more announcements of this sort to come. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is already saying we will n…

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Unquestioned Support for Israel Wasn’t Always the Way for Conservative Christians

…of this political and theological pluralism challenges the assumption that today’s Christian Zionism has been a unified and de facto stance for even the most right-wing of American Christians. After Israel’s creation in 1948, U.S. Christians were generally more concerned with the humanitarian crisis facing displaced and dispossessed Palestinians than with Israel’s significance to Christian eschatology. This concern wasn’t only informed by reports…

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Obama’s Religion Problem, Marriage Equality, and a Bush Executive Order

…he religious beliefs of some dictate the deprivation of rights for others. Today the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD) is calling on Obama to honor this week’s anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of an executive order prohibiting racial discrimination by military contractors, by finally putting an end to a Bush-era executive order that permits religious organizations receiving federal grants to discriminate in hir…

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Christians of Color Are Rejecting “Colonial Christianity” and Reclaiming Ancestral Spiritualities

…obally, stripped people of a practice vital to their health and community. Today, some researchers report that group drumming reduces anxiety and depression, increases social resilience and boosts the immune system, along with other physical and mental health benefits. “So this thing that was inherently happening in all tribal lineages was healing the very things that were hurting people,” says Pasquale Mateus, adding that they didn’t need science…

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Why Has the Critique of Hypocrisy Run Out of Steam?

…ss of pretense. Our old friend self-deception But the hypocrisy we witness today may not be so much acts of pretense and public false performance as self-deception. In Hypocrisy: Ethical Investigations, Béla Szabados and Eldon Soifer suggest that our perception of hypocrisy has shifted in modern times. If Biblical and Medieval thinkers saw hypocrisy primarily as a matter of pretense, of the difference between the inner morality and outward perform…

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