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Are Atheists The New Campus Crusaders?

…ltural opponents,” says Galef at SSA. “It comes down to which values we’re promoting. We are promoting values of critical thinking and acceptance.” Conflicting values on campus have led to unsavory events. Last year at Salisbury University in Maryland, the Atheist Society took offense when Cru students chalked a verse from the Bible: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, and their ways are vile; there is not one who doe…

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Do Make Trouble: The Complex World of Radical Jewish ‘Revenge Theologian,’ Meir Kahane

…y reading them outside academia? The popular discussion about antisemitism today is sorely under-theorized. I just read an excellent new book, still in manuscript, by a young scholar on middle-brow Jewish writing in the mid 20th Century. One of the things she shows is that from 1945 to the early 1960s there were dozens of books written by rabbis and Jewish scholars about basic Judaism, such as Milton Steinberg’s Basic Judaism or Irving Howe’s Worl…

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Colorado Springs Massacre Captures the Christian Nationalist ‘Monster In The Mirror’

…nationalism dates back to the pilgrims, my series examines how features of today’s God-and-country ideology owe a particular debt to the obsessions that transfixed the popular culture of Britain in the 1890s: the supposed “hordes” of immigrants diluting the nation’s racial stock; melancholy over the putative “weakness” of a once-great nation; panic over non-straight public expressions of sexuality; a sci-fi tinged apocalypticism, in which heroes a…

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Religion as a Front for Tyranny: A Roundtable on the Timeliness of Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”

…he Handmaid’s Tale is portrayed as more extreme than what we see around us today. Atwood was a scholar of the Puritans, and there are echoes of Puritanism in the visuals (those outfits, public punishments, forced prayer), and in the plot devices. And yet again: there are constitutional issues at hand in our present-day reality. Sure, freedom of religion is increasingly being used as a weapon by conservatives, but who’s really threatened by that? M…

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When Religious Disagreement Seems the Least of Our Problems: The Future for “Interfaith” in a Divided Society

…was suggesting that religious divisions are now a bigger question for the United States than race. This was wrong in 2007. It is wrong today. Not only does it understate the challenge of the color line. It also overstates the role of faith. Yes, religious ideas are involved in conflict. But they rarely appear alone. The two most virulent forms of religious prejudice in America today—Islamophobia and anti-Semitism—are largely about xenophobia and…

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Welcome to the “Spin-od”: Conservatives Look to Halt Reforms on Divorce and Other “Family Matters”

…ring the synod, but it was possible to change pastoral practice to reflect today’s realities. … The new practices, it was claimed, simply fit better with the current situation of many people in the Church. But that wasn’t manipulation—it was the key purpose of the synod and the question Francis asked it to address. Most of what conservatives term “manipulation” was newly empowered progressive bishops pushing for change, something they hadn’t had t…

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The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

…, should mean that no declaration of a ‘coming to Jesus’ moment on race by today’s conservatives should be taken at face value. The political survival of the pro-enslavement camp back then required duplicity, i.e, paying lip service to non-racialism and the enfranchisement of Black people while plotting their harm and repression just as the political survival of today’s conservatives requires plausible deniability regarding their racist remarks an…

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Pentagon Report Rejects Religious Right Arguments On DADT

…roops. Surveys of troops back then revealed many of the same objections as today. Harvard professor and author Peter Gomes, in an op-ed in the New York Times in 1993, after DADT first passed, noted a few of them: In 1942, the General Board of the Navy was asked by Admiral Knox to consider “enlistment of men of colored race in other than mess-man branch.” In its report to the Secretary of the Navy, it asked, “How many white men would choose, of the…

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Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

…raged these efforts, cited the polls, and at times even commissioned them. Today, when media outlets talk about “evangelicals,” they almost always mean white, politically conservative, born-again Protestants, unless they specify otherwise. The problem is that theological definitions of what makes someone an evangelical vary widely—and tweaking them, Wuthnow shows us, can generate substantial changes in poll results. Nobody actually agrees on the b…

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Rep. Smith Suggests a New Protected Class: “Immaturity”

…xposure of abortion would spark a civil rights movement for fetuses. Smith today added some language that makes quite clear that he’s envisioning fetuses as a protected class, much like age, race, religion, gender, or disability. From his statement: [L]ast week, with full and unequivocal support of Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, more than 165 members of Congress joined Dan Lipinski and I [sic] to introduce the No Taxpayer Fu…

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