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Trump is a Nightmare, Sure, But Can He Actually Do Anything?

By Sunnivie Brydum

…and started organizing.” Berry pointed to the numerous failed efforts to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, raucous town hall meetings with members of Congress, and even the administration’s own back-and-forth on some key legislative priorities as evidence of successfully organized resistance. And despite the overwhelming sense of constant calamity that Trump’s tweets tend to elicit, Berry sees room for progress. Because the administra…

Census Reveals Gay People are Shockingly… Normal

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

According to new census figures, the number of people reporting that they are living with a same-sex partner has risen 52 percent in the last decade. That’s almost 902,000 people who are living all across the United States. Even here in my own incredibly conservative state of South Carolina, the number of same-sex couples increased and a quarter of them are raising children. It’s those kinds of facts that have right-wing media like the Christian…

New Research Links Spiritual-Not-Religious to Mental Disorder

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ll-being. So, too, religious constructions of gender that map to issues of reproductive health, educational equality, body image, domestic violence, poverty, and so on clearly undermine multiple dimensions of wellness in ways that are masked by studies that overgeneralize diverse, often contradictory notions and practices of religion. There are plenty of good reasons to explore the web of connections between religion and health. But encouraging th…

What Irish Marriage Vote Means for Catholic Church; The Lonely Fight for Equality in Belize; Progress and Backlash in Tunisia; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e’s Antigay Laws,” asking, “Can one challenge to a statute criminalizing sodomy create a domino effect in the Caribbean?” The story profiles activist Caleb Orozco, whose legal challenge to the colonial-era law that punishes gay sex with up to 10 years in prison has been met with insults, threats, and violence. “The L.G.B.T. community in Belize, with the exception of a dedicated corps of organizers and supporters, remains timid, fractured and apoli…

YOU Are Spiritual But Not Religious: The Secret Spiritual History of the Choose Your Own Adventure Books

By Daniel Silliman

…at happens in this story!” The first book sold 8,000 copies, an impressive number for an independent press. The series was then bought up by Bantam Books and re-branded Choose Your Own Adventure in 1980. An initial marketing push gave 100,000 copies of The Cave of Time to librarians, who loved the concept and the effect it had of getting kids to actually sit down and read. Selling for $2.95 apiece, more than 50 titles were published over the next…

As Tensions Escalate in the Balkans, the West Could Hand Putin a Valuable Weapon

By Katherine Kelaidis

…de against Albanian Kosovars in the late 1990s. The fact is, a significant number of Serbs, and even a large number of others from traditionally Orthodox backgrounds, continue to harbor a great deal of anger about Western intervention in the Kosovo War, which they see as a failure by the West to comprehend the historical role-reversal that’s taken place, including the persecution of Orthodox Christians by Albanians and other majority-Muslim ethnic…

The War On Terror Is Over

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…tant that America be seen as championing the just cause of Palestinian freedom. The Baker-Hamilton Commission report correctly concluded that peace between Israelis and Palestinians would affect the way that the U.S. is perceived in the Middle East, and that a positive outcome to the peace process would undermine the militant anti-American jihadi cause. The perception that the U.S. is tied to Israel affects everything else that the U.S. does in th…

Religious Practices on Trial in Arizona: The Problem With “Experts”

By Johnny P. Flynn

…never been Indians. Only non-Indians can be the experts. And experts have repeatedly dubbed what we do as marginal at best—unadulterated savagery at its worst. In the same way sports teams seek to own the balls-out brutality of the Indian warrior, James Arthur Ray brutalized sixty people in a plastic-covered hut less than the size of the average American living room. Because, that is how Indians become warriors. Right now Indians who do practice…

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…what’s going on, but too few seem capable of saying it. We now have a fair number of political and civic leaders who are willing to say the word trauma and talk about the all-pervasive violence in this culture, not to mention the extent of mental disturbance and the fact that American civilians have more assault rifles in their possession than does the U.S. military. All well and good. But we have too few leaders who will talk about the deeper roo…

Does God Want Jeremy Lin to Win?

By Jay Michaelson

…to a fight in a bar, or behaves inappropriately with women, or commits any number of minor sins which ordinary people get away with every day—he lets down not only himself and his family, but his faith community and the Asian-American (and to some extent Asian) community as a whole, which currently views him as a hero. Can you imagine the pressure? And yet, so far at least, neither Tebow nor Lin has fallen. No crashed cars at three a.m., no extram…