Search for "CNN International cleantalkorg2.ru Headlines Videos Stories and Videos on News breaking newstoday bbc news news word BBC News World"

Did the Duggars’ Fundamentalism Cause Sexual Abuse? Not So Fast

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…rights activists are finding patterns in something else: the high-profile news stories of female teachers who have sexually abused their underage male students. People who don’t like feminism—or who may simply harbor a distaste for women in general—look at those stories, see a pattern, and conclude that it’s the fault of the sexual revolution and women working outside the home. So, too, with critics of the Human Rights Campaign, whose co-founder…

Why So Many American Christians Don’t Understand Protest

By Leah Pannell

…ruptive. As a Christian, my faith tells me that God understood this and disrupted the world in a human body. Filled with the Spirit, Jesus declared, “You have nothing to lose but your chains!” He walked the earth, protesting the powers of death and darkness, disrupting systems as he healed the sick, embraced the poor, and ultimately claimed victory over death and the grave. It’s hard for me to comprehend how so many fellow Christians misunderstand…

Belize Overturns Sodomy Law Defended by Religious Right, Ugandan Officials Will Continue to Suppress Gay Groups, And More on the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…’s constitution, includes sexual orientation. BuzzFeed has the text of the ruling. Activists hope that the ruling will have an impact on other Caribbean countries; the attorney general of Antigua said that the government would be “looking at” the ruling. American Religious Right groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and C-Fam have provided support to Belize Action, a group that fought the decriminalization effort. Georgia: President blocks…

When Children’s Literature is Not Defined by “Innocence”

By Jodi Eichler-Levine

…re grafted into greater American civic acceptance through their children’s stories—especially those stories with overtones of suffering, exodus, and sacrifice—in modes that have long been part of the grand narratives of American religious history. I don’t say that to degrade those narratives or to promote them—but to notice how they are always with us, and how memory work is a practice, and a very complicated one. In the case of Jews, African Amer…

Watching Preachers’ Daughters Right After the Boston Bombings While Teaching a Class on Augustine’s Confessions

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…They are told it’s for their own good, by people who actually believe the stories to be true. Having been told appalling, harmful stories, those children go on to behave in appalling and harmful ways—like when, in Book II, Augustine steals some pears. Some readers accuse Augustine of overreacting here, making a youthful indiscretion into a grand and lurid sin. But Augustine’s point is exactly that it wasn’t grand or interesting. It was small and…

Hebrew Bible as Lord of the Rings

By Paul Harvey

…rom the end of David to the baptism of Jesus—regrettably missing some cool stories from the New Testament of Jesus confounding the religious teachers at the temple) carries us along mostly from one sword fight and rampaging Babylonian/Persian/Roman legion to another, knocking the Jews about from one place to another. How many slow-motion scenes of the sword being pulled out from the dying man do we need to get the point? I began to feel like a par…

Jeff Sharlet’s Weird Religion, in 13 Chapters

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…criticisms arise, however subtly; in descriptions of Ron Luce’s BattleCry crusades, the greedy gurus of New York/New Age mysticism, media tycoons, or late night apocalyptic radio preachers. The practitioners of weird religion aren’t all ones that we (liberals anyway) want to welcome into our homes, but in these essays Sharlet is careful to notice the humanity of the people he is writing about. In good liberal fashion, there would seem to be no one…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…city of the Biblical account one of the most accurate history books in the world[.] “Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him, and he will act.” (Psalm 37:5) Judaism Interpreted through Christian Eyes When it comes to scripture shared by Jews and Christians—the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament—many courses present the material primarily as a series of prophetic predictions about Jesus. A chart in one class titled “Jesus and the Genesis Flood” highligh…

Does God Want Jeremy Lin to Win?

By Jay Michaelson

…of us, while wicked people thrive. Denying this fact is just denying the truth, and to me, denying the truth is denying God. Another bad theological move is to cherry-pick the good things that happen and ascribe them to God, while blaming all the bad stuff on Satan, or demons, or something. This quasi-Manichean, quasi-Gnostic move has made a comeback in recent years, culminating in the New Apostolic movement’s belief that entire cultures are poss…

Do Tea Partiers Use Religious Justification For Racial Rhetoric?

By Julie Ingersoll

…uage. This all occurred in a context in which people took these to be the true meanings of these stories. This exercise does more than show us just how wrong “they” were; it pushes us to recognize the degree to which our own readings of texts (whether those texts be the Bible, the Qu’ran, or the Constitution) can never be as certain as they seem. It’s not my point here to debate the “true meanings” of these texts; I guess that’s a task for believe…