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Old Sins Cast Long Shadows: America’s Enduring Fascination with the Ten Commandments

…, there’s a whopper of a story here, I thought; one that went back quite a number of years and that encompassed matters of faith and ritual practice, material culture and daily life as well as the law. I then spent a number of years tracking down, unearthing and interpreting the many iterations of the ancient biblical passages that turned out, much to my surprise and delight, to be just about everywhere in the United States of the late 19th and ea…

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What’s So Troubling About Funding a Playground? How Trinity Lutheran Undermines the First Amendment

…ecycled tires. Prospective grantees were evaluated and selected based on a number of factors, including poverty level of the surrounding area and their willingness to generate media exposure for Missouri. In 2012, Trinity Lutheran, a Missouri Synod congregation, applied for the grant to renovate the playground of a preschool owned and operated by the church. While it ranked highly, Trinity Lutheran was denied the grant because of a department poli…

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Boo! Trump’s Lead With Religious Voters Not As Bigly As You Might Think

…support comes from white Evangelicals and his weakest from Hispanics and African-Americans. We’ll talk about the minorities in a minute. Here, let us notice that while Evangelical support for Trump is overwhelming, he’s actually running quite a bit behind Mitt Romney’s 79% and even John McCain’s 73%. He’ll still win the demographic handily, but it won’t do him much good. Trump needs to improve on Romney’s scores with white voters in order to keep…

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Trump with back to camera stands before a frenzied crowd with raised fist.

With ‘Vermin’ Remark Trump Crosses Fully into Nazi Territory

…ican Values Survey was the increase in support for political violence. The number of Americans who agreed that “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” has jumped from 15% to 23% over the past two years. Today approximately one in three Republicans (33%) and White evangelical Protestants (31%) believe that political violence might be necessary to save the coun…

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I Was Nearly Seduced by David Brooks’ Reasonable Analysis

from now. You shouldn’t buy “bundles,” enormous collections of bad debt, or worse still, imaginary insurance policies, simply because the person selling them has called them “securities.” This crisis is ironically not psychological at all, though much of the pain is. No, this crisis in empirical, a simple matter of numbers (and words) not adding up. And the reason they don’t? Because people, really bad people, lied about them, cooked the books, s…

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7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

…ociation for the Sociology of Religion, and the Religion Section of the American Sociological Association. Elaine Howard Ecklund examines contemporary American religion and its intersections with science—specifically, how scientists interact with religion and how religious believers make sense of science. She is the author of Science v. Religion: What Scientists Really Think. In her writing, including including Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety and…

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Swiftboating Obama’s Health Care Reform?

…tive philanthropy funded organizations, and media outfits, and includes Americans for Fair Taxation, Americans for Hope, Growth & Opportunity, the Discovery Institute, the Federalist Society, the Manhattan Institute, L. Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Bozell’s Parents Television Council, Regnery Publishing, and Phillip Anschutz’s Walden Media. As I…

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Ten of Our Favorite Top Tens

…idates and the pastors they kept company with; Jeremiah Wright “damned” America, discredited himself (in the mainstream press) and almost took Obama down with him, while McCain’s pursuit of the demented John Hagee’s endorsement almost sent the candidate home to Arizona. 3.) TOP TEN RELIGION STORIES FROM CHRISTIANITY TODAY What’s particular to this list, posted by the Billy Graham-founded “magazine of evangelical conviction,” is the focus on intern…

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Updated: G-O-D Plays a Bit Part in First GOP Debate

…en for thinking that Reagan was God, or at least a patron saint, given the number of times he was name-checked in the debate. Mostly it went like this. The candidates did talk about hot-button social issues, but they held back from claiming religious sponsorship of their ideas. It’s not clear if they’d gotten the memo about not antagonizing religiously unaffiliated voters, or if they simply didn’t see much advantage in differentiating themselves a…

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Who Would the Buddha Bomb?

…d cultural context of American Buddhism, the development of this new cyber-sangha of American Buddhist soldiers represents a new generation’s answer to the predominantly anti-war Buddhism of 1960s and 1970s that continues to define Buddhism in the public imagination,” he writes. Elsewhere, two titans of Theravada Buddhism in the United States have found themselves at loggerheads over their differing views about defensive war. In one of the final i…

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