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Hookers for Jesus: Sex and Salvation on the Strip

By Nicole Greenfield

…nuinely enslaved in prostitution.” The issue of sex trafficking has been a central evangelical concern for more than a decade. Led by Michael Horowitz, a neo-conservative scholar at the Hudson Institute, a coalition of evangelicals including Chuck Colson (joined improbably by a group of feminists who had already been championing the cause) pushed for legislation that would eventually become the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000. Wh…

Zen and the Art of the Sex Scandal

By Gary Gach

…ivine commandment. In Buddhism, there’s no creator deity. Nor is there any central Buddhist institution, such as a Vatican. Rather, in establishing one of humanity’s first monastic orders, the Buddha set forth a matrix and process of conscious behavior (vinaya) based on actual conduct. As such, it’s thus not top-down but, rather, bottom-up. Different cultures put their own spin on the teachings (Dharma). Some schools have five central precepts; ot…

American Christmas (Shopping) and the Protestant Reformation

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ked out with a Christmas tree, Christmas lights, and a manger scene in the central Piazza, this curiously Protestant concern with images seems a bit, well, a bit out of place. The thing is, in Rome, Jesus isn’t in Christmas, at least not until the morning of the 25th. Manger scenes in Rome don’t have a Baby Jesus; the cradle is left empty until Christmas morning. So there’s no question of getting Jesus out, much less taking him out, of Christmas….

Where Are the Pro-Life Reactions to the Romney/Stericycle Story?

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…s of this writing. National Right to Life? Top headline as of July 3, 3:57 central time was “Supreme Court Decision Means Americans Must Elect Mitt Romney and a Pro-Life Congress Committed to Repealing ObamaCare.” Susan B. Anthony List? Its president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, wrote a column for National Review Online yesterday titled “Pro-Lifers Must Unite Behind Romney.” (The discussion in the comments thread did make its way around to the Stericyc…

How Thanksgiving Became All Dinner, No Worship

By Bruce David Forbes

…Thomas Jefferson), martyrs (Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr.), and central shared beliefs (freedom, equality, a divine purpose for the nation). Over the years, scholars have debated this idea of an American civil religion. Is it actually a religion or is it just similar to a religion? Should more traditional religions like Judaism and Christianity see a national civil religion as a rival, or can they be combined? Good questions. This relat…

The Tea Party are Sodomites

By Jay Michaelson

…e story of Sodom is in a biblical section where hospitality and ethics are central themes. Only one chapter earlier, Abraham had welcomed three men to his tent, and the text spends five verses on the details of the menu he prepares. (Indeed, after departing, these men “look toward Sodom,” suggesting they may be the same messengers—the Hebrew word malachim is less supernatural than “angels”—as appear in the next chapter.) Right after Abraham’s barg…

Talking Back to a Mormon Elder: Religion versus Reality

By Brent D. Beal

…hen there are Roy and Silo, two male Chinstrap penguins in New York City’s Central Park Zoo that successfully hatched an egg they’d been given. And so on. In the case of humans, it’s been around for thousands of years (if not longer). Homosexuality is a part of nature—a part of the world that God created (if you believe that God created it)—and by any definition of the word, it’s natural. Okay, I think, Elder Packer is old. He’s a product of a dif…

Immigration As A Progressive Game Changer—Without Evangelical Support

By Sarah Posner

…eligious right’s effort to reshape itself for the 21st century through the Freedom Federation. His central tenet of theo-politics: to “repudiate the spirit of Herod, the spirit of Sodom and Gomorrah, the spirit of Jezebel.” Rodriguez, like the Catholic bishops, opposes immigration reform with LGBT equality. But a bloc of House Democrats are opposed to letting that critical piece of justice fall away from comprehensive immigration reform. As Rep. J…

Vatican Equates Women’s Ordination with Priest Pedophilia?

By Mary E. Hunt

…he first place. Or, perhaps the foxes may really think that this effort to centralize power with even less accountability can take place quietly since so many people will be exercised over the mere suggestion of women priests. Stay tuned, but I think they miss their guess. There is simply no comparison between a theological argument over who is “fit matter” to be ordained and the destruction of a child’s life; not to mention the thousands of peopl…

Proposition 8, Mormonism, and the Other Fight for Alternative Marriage

By Holly Welker

…cussing the church’s involvement with polygamy. I believe that polygamy is central to an understanding of the church’s attitude toward gay marriage. Several years ago, at a gathering comprised primarily of faithful Mormons, I heard an LDS lawyer state quietly that one reason the church was so anxious to institute bans on gay marriage was that the leaders knew that if gay marriage ever became widely legal and accepted, polygamy would subsequently b…