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What To Do When Fred Phelps Arrives in Your Neighborhood

…ether we’d still have segregation and child labor and… Fantasy, of course, does not take the courage that the real dissent of our past and present takes. It does not take the rule-breaking and risk of young students at a Greensboro lunch counter or many others. Neither does Fred Phelps’ nastiness. And yet, today it feels somewhat better than intruding on grief. Or giving Fred Phelps even more press than this article does.   Angry Speech in Our Hea…

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Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…

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Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

…sponse there was came mostly from church leaders, who were skeptical. What does it mean to say that 95% of the public believe in God? That doesn’t tell us much of anything, and so it took a long time for Gallup and his competitors to sell the idea that polling about anything, including religion, was of interest or importance. It wasn’t until the 1950s, during the Cold War period—with the idea that America is a religious country and the Soviet Unio…

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The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…

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In the Aftermath of the “Himalayan Tsunami”

…(first as Uttaranchal) in 2000, the region has seen a massive rise in the number of visitors to the region, especially by the growing Indian middle class. Roads widened and hotels and visitor services grew exponentially. Building a new hotel or a restaurant by the side of the road felt like a smart investment—even when the road was near a river. Kedarnath saw the building of new cell phone towers, a railway reservation office, helicopter landing…

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Yes, It’s Worse To Be Gay in Russia

…bravery. The law that passed in June—which is, I think, best explained as cheap populist scapegoating—has served to activate and embolden widespread homophobia, which seems to me to have been previously often latent (the homophobia I encountered in Vladimir 10 years ago was none too aggressive). Phenomena like “Occupy Pedophilia” have appeared on the scene. Although it’s hard to say exactly how common anti-LGBT violence is in Russia, it should be…

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“Giving Godhead”: A Bloody Vision of Religion’s Deepest Influence

…s per page, though as U2 showed us some dozen albums ago, an oral fixation does come organically with a tradition of wine and wafers, descent and rising up, kneeling and being filled with spirit. Krieger, like those ridden by rapturous moments at a revival, goes slack sometimes, and this book has its limp, cheap moments, cellophane grass and gassy puns that might only elicit an “organ yawn” from readers. It may not be the best poetry collection in…

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Recovering From Rejection: The Second Coming of Ted Haggard

…uild a church in Colorado Springs than the rapid population boom fueled by cheap land that would lead to a new free market Christianity political power base in the Western United States. In less than a decade, Haggard built one of the most influential megachurches in the nation. Not Everybody Loves a Comeback Story Today, Haggard and his wife Gayle jet set nearly every weekend to speak at emergent churches across the nation with a well-worn script…

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Trayvon Martin and American Exceptionalism

…even have the courtesy to check Trayvon’s phone for his mom and dad’s telephone numbers because it’s just a black criminal’s body to them. While Zimmerman the trigger man slept in his bed, the police ordered a drug and alcohol test for Trayvon’s lifeless body. A black body that was representative of evil against the whiteness of George Zimmerman. I hesitated to write about this story, because there are many good stories about Trayvon and his pare…

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“You’ve Never Met a Muslim”

…, there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim in this country. Being Muslim does not make me any less American.   Haroon Moghul_________ How Far is it to Islam? We spent the first Monday evening of my senior year plastering every dorm we could with fliers for the Islamic Center at NYU’s first event of the year. We slipped into the dorms we couldn’t get signed into, and posted hundreds of cheap notices printed on 8.5 x 11 paper. We’d invited a promi…

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