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

“I’m a Creationist,” Says Former Times Tech Writer, Heffernan

By Michael Schulson

…s we tell are not inconsequential things. They matter. Sure, in the modern world we do have the freedom to choose our guiding stories. And, here in postmodernity, we do have theories that relativize and contextualize, making that choice seem arbitrary. But none of this means that, once we’ve chosen an idea, it exists in a vacuum, tickling our minds and having no effect on things like, say, funding for scientific research, or the rights of children…

You’re Using It Wrong: Rachel Held Evans Returns to the Bible

By Eric C. Miller

…white evangelicals now use the Bible to justify their marriage to Donald Trump. How should the Bible be used by the Resistance? I didn’t want to write too much about Trump because I knew it would date the book. But I think his election is significant to the story of American religion. One thing I’ve done is to compare his presidency to the reign of Xerxes in the story of Esther. Xerxes was a misogynistic, fragile, pathetic racist who had been ent…

Accept Gays? Only If They Know Their Place

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…sor at Mercer University, recounts Elke’s story and some of the other heartbreaking stories of gays and lesbians crushed and torn by religious hatred in his review of the book in the latest issue of The Christian Century. As an evangelical Christian whose career has been spent in the South, I must say I find it scandalous that the most physically and psychologically dangerous place to be (or even appear to be) gay or lesbian in America is in the m…

Decoding Scalia’s Secret Hunting Society, From Jägermeister to Medieval Heresy to Buddhist Legend

By Joseph A. P. Wilson

…the presence of the majestic deer, and witnesses a radiant vision of the crucifixion in the animal’s enormous horns. In repentance for his sins, he renounces his worldly ambitions, is ordained, and subsequently lives a pious life of solitude in the forest where he then has his faith repeatedly tested. Icon of Hubertus (Wikimedia Commons) Virtually the same legend is attributed to an earlier Roman saint, Eustace (née Placidus), set in the second c…

Inside InterVarsity’s Purge: Trauma and Termination at the Premier Evangelical Student Org

By Deborah Jian Lee

…ve, donors protested by canceling “several thousand” sponsorships of Third World children, according to World Vision president Richard Stearns. Within days he reinstated the old policy of prohibiting gays and lesbians from employment. In 2015, when Seattle’s EastLake Community Church became one of the first megachurches to fully affirm and include LGBTQ people, it lost more than half of its members and was forced shut down its satellite sites. Thi…

Why We Stay: What the History of Mormonism Reveals About the Origins of “Race”

By Max Mueller

…rratology. As I write in the book, race “is less about skin and more about stories—stories about how racial differences came to be in the past and how such racial differences can be overcome in the future” (34). 3. Relatedly, that the Book of Mormon isn’t worth studying. Race and the Making of the Mormon People contains the most sustained analysis of Mormonism’s foundational text of a history of race and religion published to date. Yet my book com…

Why Are We Drawn to Horror?

By Mathias Clasen

…n nature. If we weren’t fearful, imaginative creatures we’d have no horror stories—and if we want to understand why we are fearful, imaginative creatures, we have to get a fix on our evolutionary history and the biological forces that shaped our nature. So, my take-home messages are these: Let’s take horror seriously, and let’s take our own biological heritage seriously, because that heritage helps explain how and why scary entertainment works. Is…

The New Normaal: “Black Pete,” Muslims and Whiteness in the Netherlands

By Suzanne van Geuns

…. Although Dutch Muslims are generally peripheral to the anti-Black Pete struggle, the move Rutte’s letter makes to align them is insightful. Rutte’s letter reinforces that all Dutch people should aspire to be ‘normaal,’ and thus aligned with a socially progressive state that looks, talks, and acts white. Simultaneously, the letter renders anyone who is not white (Muslims, or all who might have reason to accuse normaal Dutch people of racism), and…

Why 9/11 Changed Everything Nothing

By Paul Harvey

…ory of the Civil War? Or to the reillusionment of the faithful fighters of World War I? If so, then our stories of war, our “war on terrorism,” will simply return to shopworn themes of spiritual regeneration and a renewal of national innocence. If history repeats itself twice, then the first time, as Faust reminds us, was tragedy, and the second time might yet be too. If, on the other hand, we find other means beyond real and metaphorical war as a…

Anti-Transgender Panel at Values Voter Summit Continues Shift Towards Storytelling as Tactic

By Heron Greenesmith

…tor, only to hear a message from her God that she was not living her full truth. All stories of gender identity are valid, as are all journeys, including the stories of people whose gender identities may fluctuate over time, as perhaps Duncan’s has. It is therefore crucial to frame stories in context and with peer-reviewed data so that a listener such as Lynn Meagher can understand that the vast majority of transgender people do not desist, nor do…