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Why I Won’t Leave the Mormon Church Alone

…ommunity. In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi states, “Changing moral codes is always costly; all heretics, apostates, and dissidents know this.” Mormons who leave the church face dire consequences: damnation, separation for all eternity from loved ones, shunning and judgment in this life, as well as irritated, self-righteous assertions that we shouldn’t even discuss parts of our own history. It’s hard to invite all that, and one main reason…

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2010: What Did We Believe In?

…to be reckoned with and has myriad forms of expression, commitment, moral codes, and values—just like global Christianity. In the U.S., Muslims are increasingly part of the social landscape, with mosques, community centers, and public figures (including the first Muslim Miss America and the easy reelection of one of the two Muslim members of Congress) who contribute to the fabulous religious mosaic that characterizes the best of American values….

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Inventing “Jihad”

…non-Muslims in order to expand Muslim realms while observing humanitarian codes of conduct against civilians is more or less accepted as a given, even by many specialists of Islam. The proof-texts invoked in support of such a position are medieval Islamic legal texts, which frequently did list such a requirement as part of the duties of the Muslim ruler and established furthermore an elaborate code of conduct for initiating war. And this is where…

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Its the Spiritual Economy, Stupid: Why the Gay Marriage Fracas Isn’t About Either

…of Californians to heed one element in an otherwise obscure list of purity codes in Deuteronomy—and that Jesus’ preaching in the gospels isn’t really complete without Paul’s finger-wagging in Romans—the stitching that holds together the disparate parts of the Good Book will have subtly but irrevocably loosened, along with the Bible’s centuries-old grip on American public life. Of course, religious conservatives can’t frame their proposed amendment…

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An Open Letter to Rabbi Dov Linzer on Modesty and Jewish Law

…ort their position by reading closely and deeply the same Talmud and legal codes that you do. Their community embodies an extreme yet also consistent rendering of Judaism founded on the Talmud and the legal tradition it generated. It is true that their egregious behavior steps beyond any acceptable norm. But their more general interpretation of Jewish law does not. Shouldn’t recent incidents serve to show that your anti-misogynist Orthodoxy, which…

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Why I Boycotted a Conference at Brigham Young University

…iety and for an individual’s own intellectual growth. But what about honor codes that many universities impose? These are usually attempts to regulate behavior—not thought. They attempt to prohibit, for example, alcohol and pot in student dorms. Prohibitions against thinking, against ideas that are counter to administrators’ beliefs, however, should have no place in a university. Although I am not an expert in issues of religious freedom in Americ…

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What was Pants to Church Sunday Really About?

…tly gender-segregated customs of Mormonism are—like unwritten Sunday dress codes—traditional rather than doctrinal and human rather than inspired. It was also an opportunity to start a conversation about traditional gender inequalities in a community where feminism has been unnecessarily stigmatized as an excommunicable offense.  (And for the record, it is not.) Because really, it’s not pants or the right to wear pants that tops the list of Mormon…

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What the USCCB’s New “Religious Liberty” Initiative Took from Evangelicals

…F’s view, cannot coexist with its version of Christianity. Anti-harassment codes at schools and universities, gay rights events, and other expressions of freedom or equal rights for LGBT people, necessarily silence Christians, who, ADF insists, are biblically compelled to condemn homosexuality. The “homosexual agenda,” then, is ipso facto anti-Christian. Alan Sears, ADF’s president, told the Family Research Council’s Values Voters Summit last fall…

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BYU Skinny Jean Controversy: Sexism, Sizeism, or Standards?

…puses in Provo, Utah, Rexburg, Idaho, and Laie, Hawaii have long had dress codes requiring students to dress conservatively, prohibiting shorts, skin-baring cropped tops, and “form-fitting clothing.” The popularity of leggings, jeggings, and skinny jeans (even Mitt Romney has a pair) has produced new attention in LDS communities to how those dress code boundaries are enforced and who bears the brunt of the enforcement. Beginning in November, the B…

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Fundamentalist-Led Texas History Standards Get ‘D’ from Conservative Think Tank

…at all. During and after Reconstruction, there is no mention of the Black Codes, the Ku Klux Klan, or sharecropping; the term “Jim Crow” never appears. Incredibly, racial segregation is only mentioned in a passing reference to the 1948 integration of the armed forces. Or this section: Texas’s heavily politicized 2010 revisions to its social studies curriculum have attracted massive national attention. Indeed, both in public hearings and press int…

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