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U.S. Bishops’ 15–year Battle For ‘Conscience’ and Against Contraception

…by the DHHS to disqualify the USCCB from a refugee services contract (because it refused to provide the full range of sexual health services to women who had been victims of trafficking) the bishops charged the administration with waging an unprecedented war to “neuter religion” in the public square and declared that they would be forced to mobilize to fight. The fact is, however, that Catholic bishops have been waging a nearly fifteen-year campa…

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Tweeting ISIS Attacks: A Lesson in Not Learning a Lesson

…ear. The Islamic State began in 2004 as al-Qaeda’s Iraq affiliate, not because its then-leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, discovered that female motorists populate America’s highways, but because America had just invaded Iraq. We can and must fight back against ISIL. We have a moral obligation, not to mention a national security obligation. But we must be careful in that response that we do not fall prey to ideas that have already failed before (and i…

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Amazing Grace: Obama Hits a Blue Note in Charleston

…lf over and over again. Yet each instrument, including the human voice, is free to improvise as long as the pattern is not violated.” “The preacher’s art is speech music,” he said. “Not music in the sense that it is chanted or has a musical quality. But that it is organized in much the same way that one composes music. It has rhythm and pacing, it has highs and lows. Like music, it is rigidly structured but seemingly spontaneous.” The unexpected u…

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Christian Nationalism Hurts the Children It Claims to Protect — As Author Lillian Smith Understood 80 Years Ago

…rtant point is that it isn’t innocuous. It causes the heart to become calloused and creates deep chasms between individuals that can only be crossed with self-reflection, because, as Smith states, “A child’s personality grows by reaching out to others, by feeling identified with them, by acknowledging the common dignity of all men.” Calls for education reform and “protecting” children reside at the core of Christian nationalism because when childr…

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Right Makes Might: The President as Political Realist

…ood the deeper moral issues beneath. God willing, Obama will never have to use force against Iranian or North Korean nuclear facilities, but this is no cause to overlook the misery these nations bring their people. There are also moral responsibilities in war—like those that come from invading a country and overthrowing its government. The US may have been in Afghanistan for eight years, but it never committed the resources to succeed. Obama, foll…

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Do the Arguments Against Bathroom Equality Hold Water?

…“aborted a much-needed public debate over whether identity-based bathroom use can and should be regulated as a legal right, or merely left as an option.” But despite the fact that Schuck professes to believe transgender equality is a noble cause, he unnecessarily belittles and trivializes the position transgender kids are in, saying the “only value in play here is transgender people’s desire to affirm their gender identity during their few minute…

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The Anti-Gay Highway

…heology. And now we have a new wave of evangelicals who are part of that cause. I never took Liberation Theology because I went to evangelical school. They planted the seeds early. Unfortunately, they did it nicely. They built relationships from the late ’80s through to the ’90s, and by the time they said what their agenda was, they already had lots of bishops. It worked well in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda. And most of the bishops there were trained in…

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Decolonizing Jewish Studies Part II: A Response to the Backlash

…orbed. Jewish Studies is well-positioned to engage this task precisely because of the variegated cultures it studies and because of the field’s history. Decolonizing Jewish Studies is a multidirectional enterprise. On the one hand, Jewish pasts and presents have been explicitly (mis)appropriated under various imperial and religious-supremacist ideologies. Think of Augustine summoning the Jew to witness and testify to Christian hegemony, or of cons…

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Studies Confirm: Your Steak is Possessed by Demons

…he philosopher believed that animal meat is infested with evil demons that use sacrificial meals as a conduit to corrupt the human body. Once inside the body, Porphyry asserts, these demons use the human digestive system to glut their appetites, emitting harmful gasses as they digest the meat. The telltale sign of demonic infection is uncomfortable bloating, flatulence, and belching. For Porphyry, then, burps at the dinner table weren’t just viola…

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The Same Toxic Christian Right Theology Supports Both the Online Bullying I Experienced and the Cruel Anti-Trans Policy in TX — And it’s Not Remotely Fringe

…tate officials have said they believe the policy to be illegal and will refuse to comply. On Tuesday, the news dropped that Texas officials had opened “child abuse” investigations into parents who support their children in accessing age-appropriate gender-affirming medical care. They started with a state CPS employee, referred to as “Jane Doe,” who has a 16-year-old transgender daughter (“Mary Doe”) and says she feels “betrayed by my state and the…

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