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More Thoughts on Media Coverage of Liberal Religion

…han the Republican base, and includes a far more significant (and growing) number of unaffiliated voters, avowed secularists (who are both non-believers and religious people) and religious minorities. And because more of those people like the Establishment Clause and would shudder at religiously-directed public policy. Given that the Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath had the support of a variety of faith traditions, it’s a good question to ask why i…

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How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

…ity of teams are on display. There’s a certain irony here, in that an Anglophone movement that once saw itself as uniquely positioned to save the world is now looking to the globe to salvage its reputation. But it’s also indicative of the historiography that Noll, Marsden, and Bebbington helped found. In the rush to find the metaphor that best describes what evangelicalism “is,” few have asked what the term “evangelical” itself might be a metaphor…

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New Pope Accused of Conspiring in Kidnapping

…Bergoglio noted disapprovingly in a 2007 speech. Meanwhile, an astounding number of women in Argentina, women without access to or education about contraception, die annually as victims of botched abortion procedures carried out in secret.  If we do dig a little deeper into Bergoglio’s past, we find that he was accused of participating in one of the numerous human rights violations committed during Argentina’s Dirty War (which ended up resulting…

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Fusion Politics: A Way Forward for Bernie Sanders?

…think Sanders and his movement will be strongly influential. There are any number of priorities Sanders could choose from, of course. God knows it’s not like our nation isn’t in need of reform. At the moment, though, I’m less concerned with the pros and cons of any one issue than wondering what things might look like if Bernie tapped into what Rev. William Barber has named “fusion politics.” In the Christian Century, Jeremy Borden describes this a…

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Catholic Church is Lucky it’s Just Same-Sex Marriage

…either in one “ovotestis” or with one ovary and one testis). An increasing number of public and commercial health insurance companies now include defined benefits for sex reassignment surgery, and the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers, have declared the denial of such benefits discriminatory. And intersex conditions are likely to increase, since some of them, at leas…

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Speaking with Palestinian-American Republican Who Confronted GOP at Debate

…at the first “sign of adversity.” Good for him. Refusing to go away is the best way to fight bigotry. It would be easier to disappear, and a lot more troublesome to demand that the GOP consider that it could have a bigger tent if it stopped playing to such a narrow base. One day, sooner or later, I’m sure they’ll see the benefit in that. For now, both Romney and Gingrich, and the Republican establishment, would do well to note that there is an inc…

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Supreme Court Rules Religion is Special… This Time

…he one thing that they got right in this case. The U.S. has on the books a number of valuable laws against discrimination in the workplace, and all organizations (businesses, nonprofits, schools, governments) are expected to abide by these laws. Except religions, or so it now seems. According to the Tabor ruling, religious groups get a pass on the law when it comes to employees who are considered “ministerial.” The right to the free exercise of re…

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The Threat to Democracy Runs Deep, But Mathematics Could Address the Abominable State of Representation and Voting

…nt republic of Yugoslavia, a country whose socialist-era days were clearly numbered. Three ethnic parties, representing Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs, swept the election and formed the new seven-member presidency. The dream of Bosnia as a multicultural, multiethnic model of tolerance and coexistence for the rest of Yugoslavia—and Europe—had started to unravel. On June 25, 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. A bri…

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A Queer Atheist In the Heart of Mormon Country

…, a student at Brigham Young University (a private university owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, originally established in 1875), was the student organizer of “Intersecting Convictions,” the interfaith conference for which I had come to speak. The conference was held in early March at Utah Valley University, a publicly funded university in Orem, Utah, about one hour south of Salt Lake City. Audience participants…

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Obstacles for Secularists

…to become better organized as a political force, even as they increase in number. The major impediment to that kind of organization is the fact that it is very difficult for secularists to conceive of themselves in tribal terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rit…

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