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Religion, Morality, and the Death of the American Soap Opera

By Katy E. Shrout

…fifteen daytime soaps on the air, with new shows continuing to debut every year. Forty years later, only seven soaps remain, all of them aging. (The newest of these is more than twenty years old.) More alarmingly for fans, timeworn favorites are being axed. As the World Turns vanishes this fall. Guiding Light (the longest running broadcast drama ever, after 57 years on radio and television), was cancelled in 2009. Obsession with the Past By defini…

Pigging Out: What ‘Radically Unkosher’ Jewish Foodies Like Michael Pollan Are Missing

By Jonathan Schorsch

…communal institutions to support a return to their nearly extinct thousand-year-old former diet, writes Marcello di Cintio in Gastronomica. This so-far successful process, an exemplary case study of the kind of resistance to the Western diet that Pollan would admire, inevitably includes a reclamation of their culture, which: connects the emotional and spiritual lives of the O’odham with the landscape they maintain, the spirits they worship, and th…

Not All Christians are Terrorists

By Reuven Firestone

…Center” at West Point counted an average of 6 terrorism-related plots per year carried out by Muslims since 9/11. These resulted in a total of 50 fatalities. The same study found that right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year, causing a total of 254 fatalities. If you were to try to remember all the terrorist attacks in America since 9/11, which would come to mind? Probably many more perpetrated by Muslims than by Christians. That’s bec…

No God but Country: The Religion of John McCain Has Something Important to Tell Us

By Kathryn Lofton

…in 2007, commenting, “By the way, I’m no Episcopalian. I’m Baptist.” That year—preceding his current national candidacy, just seven years after he was outfoxed by Bush in South Carolina—saw many oddly confessional claims from McCain on subjects religious. “It wasn’t so much a rejection of the Episcopal Church,” McCain said in October 2007 of his move to the North Phoenix Baptist Church. “I came into that church, I sat down, I got the message of r…

Global LGBT Recap: Asylum for Victims of Homophobia Exports; Orthodox Church Sees Anti-Gay Campaign Turned Toward Itself

By Peter Montgomery

…rrective rape” against lesbians in South Africa. The story is based on two years of reporting by photographer Clare Carter. “Even in the two years I was there the stories I was hearing were getting worse,” Carter told the Independent. “Corrective rape is getting more violent.” According to the story, family members often cooperate in sometimes repeated rapes, and law enforcement often responds with a shrug. The story quotes Funda Soldaat, who runs…

Founder of Liberal Mosque in Germany Under Guard After Death Threats; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…not Muslim enough’. The Advocate’s Nico Lang wrote about T. Nhaveen, an 18-year old beaten to death by his classmates “because he was deemed insufficiently masculine.” Little is known about the deceased’s sexuality, but his death speaks volumes about the stigma of being perceived to be gay — or even a little bit feminine — in a country where homosexuality is effectively illegal. Anti-LGBT tensions have been rising in Malaysia in recent years as it…

Good News Bad News

By Amina Wadud

…worldwide, including in Egypt, can sort of become the mahram. So even that year I was denied, a female friend of mine (another American woman) made umrah a alone because she worked it out with the tour agency. This year, I am just plain old old. (Double OLD intended.) I am old enough to travel without a mahram. So actually I am not as nervous about that as I am about the second extenuating circumstance. In 2005 when I accepted an invitation to lea…

The Real Reason For “Vagina-gate”

By Jerry Faught

…order to preserve church unity. The real reason Lifeway refuses to stock A Year of Biblical Womanhood is because Lifeway is committed to upholding the fundamentalist beliefs and practices embraced by a constituency more program-oriented than theologically sophisticated. Fundamentalism is inherently andocentric and Rachel Evans’ egalitarianism threatens the insecurity of SBC male sexists who try to veil their misogyny by using the softer word “comp…

Heaven is All-American

By Mary Valle

…s off Colton’s fancies as being a product of the potent combination of a 4-year-old’s sense of unreality combined with a 4-year-old’s ability to hear things adults think he doesn’t. Todd gets weirder and weirder as his obsession with Colton’s visions increases; it’s like some kind of Protestant Vertigo in Nebraska around the edges. Which might have been an interesting story except that it’s such a thin gruel stretched out over an impossible ocean…

In Russia It Is Now a Crime to Insult Someone’s Religious Feelings

By Chrissy Stroop

…lievers” could bring fines of up to 300,000 rubles (over $9000) or up to a year of imprisonment, or fines of up to 500,000 rubles (over $15,000)—or up to three years in prison if the act is carried out in a place of worship or a place otherwise set aside for religious rituals or ceremonies (as was the famous Pussy Riot “punk prayer”). This redaction was approved by Russia’s higher legislative chamber, the Federation Council, on June 26, following…