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“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

…e lifespan was far shorter and average living conditions more squalid than today, outbreaks of plague were frequent, and death in childbirth was commonplace. In that context, it would have made no sense to say that pregnancy and childbirth were fundamentally safe, well-designed, healthy, blissful processes that if left alone would result in a healthy mother and baby. That idea wouldn’t come along until… Grantly Dick-Read and the early natural chil…

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Confront Death by Avoiding Fritos: The Gluten Lie, Fad Diets, & Foodie Faith

…t those kinds of things with religious and ritual significance. With diets today, there seems to be a lot of fear involved, too. It’s terrifying to live in a place where the causes of diseases like Alzheimer’s, autism, or ADHD, or the causes of weight gain, are mysterious. So what we do is come up with certain causes for the things that we fear. If we’re trying to avoid things that we fear, why would we invent a world full of toxins that don’t rea…

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The Theology That Inspired the Poway Synagogue Shooting (and New Zealand) Remains Strikingly Commonplace

…action physically to replace them as inhabitants of the holy land. But who today knows what the Canaanites and Philistines reported about such self-serving Hebrew claims? In their turn, Christians likewise see themselves as superseding Jews as the Chosen People, establishing a New Israel, allegedly justified in doing so by the genius of Christian “fulfillments” of ancient Jewish prophecies, matched only by the uncanny anticipation those Jewish pro…

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To Be Queer, Gifted, and Black: A Conversation with Theologian Pamela Lightsey

…with lesbians and gay persons being called queer in the pejorative sense. Today that term has been embraced, not by all, but by quite a few. Persons within the community self-identify, and by self-identifying they say they don’t want to be put into a box. They don’t want to use these binary categories of male and female, straight or homosexual. So when one says queer nowadays, one is intentionally pushing back against the binary conversations tha…

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New Report: White Evangelicals are America’s Most Anti-Trans Demographic, But Encouraging Data Overall

…in 2018. Support for trans boys competing on teams with cis boys is at 46% today, down from 61% in 2018. Here, too, religious (non)affiliation is a highly significant factor. As the report notes: The same trend occurs across all religious groups, with white evangelical Protestants least supportive of either male (26%) or female (8%) transgender students participating in high school athletic events with cisgender students who share their gender ide…

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Pressure Grows on Obama to Reject Anti-LGBT Religious Exemption

…rates calls made since 2011 for Obama to rescind the Bush executive order. Today’s letter, in contrast to yesterday’s letter from over 50 legal scholars, is more focused on framing religious freedom as a core American value that is protected, rather than endangered, by rejecting the religious exemption. The legal scholars focused more on constitutional law and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in making the case that neither Free Exercise Clau…

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2010: What Did We Believe In?

…c barrel, money rules our lives and guides our actions like no other force today. Unemployment, bailouts, national debt, foreclosures, bank regulation, layoffs, and entitlement programs—the list of economic concerns remains the same since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, but the upcoming social, cultural, and political battles over how best to deal with these concerns cuts straight to the heart of national identity—a point made dramatica…

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Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

…new groups of people. You also make it more available to commodification. Today, a studio like MNDFL can insist that it’s a non-religious space, even as it draws on religious traditions. “The secularization is explicitly designed to make [mindfulness] more marketable,” said Jeff Wilson, a Buddhism scholar at Renison University College in Canada and the author of Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Cultur…

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The Tragedy of Religious Freedom

…us Supreme Court called the restauranteur’s defense “patently frivolous.”) Today, there is a similar but not identical logic in some of the controversies on which I have previously reported, especially those of the baker who wouldn’t create a custom cake for a gay wedding and the foster care agency that refused to place children with a lesbian couple. The challenge today is how to distinguish between, on the one hand, attempts to license discrimin…

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Touched by a Michael Landon: America’s Jewish Angel

When actor, producer, and director Michael Landon died 20 years ago today, many in Christian America thought they had lost one of their own. After all, this was the man responsible for Highway to Heaven, the weekly extrusion of spiritual melodrama that first convinced network executives that American viewers would enjoy being touched by an angel. If further proof were needed, Landon appeared on The 700 Club describing feeling “electric” when play…

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