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A Writer’s Murder Raises Fears of Death-by-Decree

…ions are better than in Saudi Arabia.” He points to the status of women in today’s Iran. More than 60% of university students are women. And, unlike in Saudi Arabia, women in Iran drive. Kadivar delights in telling me that in the holy city of Qom, there are women cab drivers who specialize in taking families on excursions. But most of our conversation was about the murder of Rafiq Tagi. In an open letter to Ayatollah Lankarani, son of the author o…

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The Oil Spill and “Real Deathliness”

…can’t even grasp, and nobody—nobody—has any plausible idea of how to break free from the system. There are plenty of ideas floating around, yes, but there are no easy answers to put into practice today. If there were, we’d be using them. That’s what we’re afraid of and what we can’t afford to admit even to ourselves. So to my mind, this “Targum on Romans” does more to speak to the situation than all the pretty talk about “creation care”: So here’s…

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Ugandan Gay Rights Activist Murdered, US Evangelicals Must Take Responsibility

…. evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood!” In a statement today, Political Research Associates condemned the murder and demanded an end to “the export of homophobia to Uganda by American conservatives.” “Kato’s murder is a heavy blow to the international human rights community,” said Rev. Kapya Kaoma, the director of PRA’s Project on Religion and Sexuality. “Those U.S conservatives who have lit the brushfire of homophobia in Afric…

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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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Mormon-Born Daya Mata Typifies American Yoga

…me of our ideas about what American yoga is and what it means to Americans today. Although we tend to associate yoga’s entrance into the United States with the counterculture of the 1960s and especially the Beatles, gurus from India began to disseminate their creative and innovative renditions of yoga to Americans well before then. The Science of the Experience of God Paramahansa Yogananda, founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship, was the secon…

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Pressure Grows on Obama to Reject Anti-LGBT Religious Exemption

…n. The legal scholars focused more on constitutional law and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in making the case that neither Free Exercise Clause nor RFRA require an exemption to preserve religious liberty. In addition to the religious organizations, today’s letter was signed by an array of civil rights and liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and the NAACP….

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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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Religious Freedom Gets Hollywood Treatment

…cided with the Congress’ hurried alteration to the Constitution to expland freedom of belief to include freedom of conscience, Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to the cristero stronghold of Guanajuato state, and a papal flyover (in the presidential helicopter) around the Cristo Rey monument near León. (Mexicans go to the polls on July 1.) The U.S. also stands in need of the film’s message right now, according to Barroso: “The movie is about conscience. No o…

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