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Obama Inaugural Address Challenges Tea Party History

…the Republic included “as he died to make men holy let us die to make men free,” when the more common version these days calls on us to “live to make men free.”  Yet even with regard to the way military force has been central to what it means to be American, the president presented a new narrative, asserting that “peace and lasting security do not mean we are in a state of perpetual war.” One of the most important ways in which the tea party and…

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The Non-Existent Tea Party-Religious Right God Gap

…ek at the Values Voters Summit. Here, I heard a lot of talk about economic freedom, the supposedly free-spending, monstrous, socialist government, and about the wonders of free enterprise. Most people hear that, and they think, what happened to the God talk? These people must be trying to appeal to the largely secular tea parties. But it’s there. While many tea partiers might come to a rally with an entirely secular objection to what they call “bi…

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Book Burning and the Scapegoating of Islam

…the West, book burning has come to symbolize the totalitarian rejection of free expression—a desire to enforce conformity of thought. While there is no doubt that something like this is going on with Terry Jones and his church (not to mention Phelps), there is another symbolic meaning that is more ancient and, I suspect, more instructive. I have in mind the symbolism of making burnt offerings to supernatural powers. Rene Girard is a philosopher wh…

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Trump’s Fear and Loathing Won’t Silence The Nation’s Sole LGBT Muslim Organization

…e very survival of minority communities. As MASGD puts it, “none of us are free until all of us are free.” To get a sense of what motivates MASGD’s activism, particularly in the current political atmosphere, I interviewed four pioneers of the American LGBT Muslim movement: Faisal Alam, Urooj Arshad, Raquel E. Saraswati, and Tynan Power. These leaders are members of MASGD’s Steering Committee, and were gracious enough to discuss with me their appre…

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I Always Knew Santa Was Make-Believe: A Retired Pastor on Losing Her Faith

…Bush declared that he had to invade Iraq because God wanted to set people free. I paced our empty church and told the President: “You just cut my umbilical cord to Christianity.” I had no idea what that meant. If President Bush was like a midwife, cutting my connection to those lifelong beliefs, then what new life was being born? Years later, Phil reminded me that someone else had freed us from our theological assumptions in a far more generous a…

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Unintended Consequences: Overturning Roe v. Wade May Endanger This Cherished Evangelical Practice

…marry a partner regardless of sex (Obergefell v. Hodges), the right to be free from compulsory sterilization (Skinner v. Oklahoma), and the right to be free from government-mandated surgery (Winston v. Lee). One only needs to look around the world to see what the ADF has planned next for the United States, which includes dismantling other civil rights of marginalized populations. While evangelicals wait with bated breath for the end of Roe, they…

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Lindsey Graham’s Lying “Eye-ranians”

…al to an argument that you are just trying to dial us back to the Jim Crow south—wait, did someone cheer?—would be to break apart a growing alliance between the left and minority communities of color by using people of color, about whom it’s a lot harder to argue ‘you’re just poorly disguised Southern white supremacists,’ to argue your points. But that would mean talking to people who are lying to you, like I am right now. Thank you, and God bless…

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Does Traditional Christian Marriage Just Mean “Not Gay”?

…a. The Hitching Post offers three venues for the wedding: a chapel, mostly free of religious symbols but adorned with flowers and foliage; a “Western room,” with cowboy-boot-and-gun decor; and a “Victorian Sitting Room,” which also has flowers and foliage. The ministers will also perform weddings at ski resorts and outdoor locations. They have performed weddings on boats, on horseback, on roller coasters, and in hot air balloons. None of this seem…

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Does God Hate Health Care? How About Public Schools? Or Bridges?

…or Mormon anti-state conservatism is the idea that these programs mitigate freedom of choice. Mormon theology holds that the purpose of human existence is the free exercise of human agency—the ability to choose—so that men and women can learn by experience and prepare themselves to share in the glory of God. Of course, this emphasis on agency never hindered the nineteenth-century Mormon practices of economic communitarianism. But early twentieth-c…

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A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

…g meals or the “click, click, click” of the computer mouse in response to “free shipping!” “40 % off!” or “Buy one get one free!” in the United States, we are gluttonous consumers of material goods (and food, but that is a whole other subject). The value and consequences of shopping in dominant US culture puts the consumer on a roller-coaster ride. One year we are told that excessive, unwise spending and its resultant debt have led our country int…

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