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Biden’s New Domestic Terrorism Strategy Addresses Trump’s Omission of White Nationalism, But Fails to Address Targeting of Black and Brown Americans

…claration that it respects the “foundational constitutional protection for free speech and association.” Indeed, the history of surveillance in the United States beginning with the establishment of the FBI in 1908 is the chronicle of infringing upon civil liberties and freedom of speech in order to target individuals and communities deemed to be politically subversive, including (perceived) communists, civil rights leaders, and communities of colo…

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Is Pope Francis Yogaphobic?

…lity courses, yoga courses, or zen courses, but none of those things would free the person to be like a child of God. Only the Holy Spirit, according to Francis, has the power to break the hardness of the heart and make it docile toward God and free to love. Given the frequent Catholic and evangelical yogaphobic moments in recent history, I asked myself if the Pope’s remarks were yogaphobic, but I concluded that yogaphobia did not appear to be at…

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Beverly Cleary, Author of the Ramona Series, Understood Children, Shoes, School, Words, and How it Feels to be Heard, or Misunderstood

…arted the third grade . . . Grown-ups did not understand that summers were free from grades.” She also catches grown-ups speaking earnest nonsense. Virginia Lee Burton’s 1939 classic Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel may be about, as her teacher tells her, “digging the basement of the town hall,” but Ramona knows that her pressing question, namely, “how did Mike Mulligan go to the bathroom when he was digging the basement of the town hall?” stand…

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T-Shirts and Minarets: The Rending of the Social Contract

…enment ideas are, when the refrain one hears is that there is no religious freedom in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is atrocious when it comes to matters of religious freedom. However, they do not claim to embrace the Enlightenment or difference. It does not seem to be a good idea to race to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to rights. Either rights are good thing or they are not. It should not be a matter of “rights are good thing, but if no on…

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RDPulpit: Israel in Gaza: Right but not Smart

…ans, subject only to full search and seizure of any weapons. Israel allows free travel of food, gas, electricity, water, and consumer goods and materials including transports from land, air, and sea, subject only to full search and seizure of any weapons or materials typically used for weapons; D. Israel agrees to release all Palestinians held in detention with or without trial or in prison and to return those Palesitnians to the West Bank or Gaza…

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The Religious “Right” to Denounce Homosexuality

…next front in the religious right’s military culture war, in which it has promoted overt proselytizing by both chaplains and officers, and in the process, portrayed the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as epic confrontations between Christianity and Islam. Now, with its military evangelists in place, the religious right is taking one of its civilian crusades — to paint homosexuality as a religious war between the equal rights of sexual minorities…

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How “Gratitude” Underwrites Inequality, Power, and Exclusion

…elites could pit the masses against each other, creating a vertical divide between the people in place of a horizontal divide between the classes. That’s how it stops being a democratizing force and starts to insulate the status quo. Gratitude operates in a similar way, with similar potentials. When we find ourselves in a position of owing—and people in a democratic society always owe something to other people—we may become vulnerable to control….

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God Promises to Open our Graves: A Theology for the Age of AIDS

…is tall, muscular, usually white, blue eyes, short hair, clean-shaven, and free of blemishes—healthy-looking. With these ideals in mind, is it any wonder that my high school students made the choices they did? Perhaps “Natasha” and “Mark” reminded the “healthy-looking” students too much of human fragility at a time when they perceived themselves to be invincible. Or, on a more mundane level, the sick and ugly ones just were not beautiful enough, a…

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The Lesser and the Greater Pilgrimage

…exuberance. Sorta like skydiving tandem before following up my lessons for free-fall skydiving. That way I can focus on the details I am trying to learn now and be better prepared. As far as umrah, the lesser pilgrimage, goes; it stands to reason that people can visit the ka’abah any time of the year. And so it is. There are still the same ihram prescriptions. There are still certain rites that should be performed. But unless a journey to Makkah c…

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The Contraceptive Mandate and Animal Suffering

…ther blogs has accused Singer of an “advocacy sleight of hand” in equating freedom of religion with “freedom to worship.” Smith and his crowd want not only an expanded definition of what is to be a religion, they want any activity a group or individual claims is “religious” to fall outside the scope of government control. He says “the exercise of one’s religion involves how the faithful live their lives outside of the church, synagogue, temple, or…

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