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Evangelical Healthcare Sharing Plan Catastrophically Fails — But Why Did So Many Join in the First Place?

By Chrissy Stroop

…f right-wing Christians can’t exert total control over policy in a particular area, they will try to create their own alternative in which they can exert total control, if that’s at all possible (all while repeating ad nauseam, of course, that “God is in control”). To be sure, it has proven possible to carve out these enclaves while simultaneously attempting to exert control over society and policy outside them, as we see today in the Christian Ri…

Catholic Nuns Back Obamacare Contraception Access

By Patricia Miller

…cess contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act as the Supreme Court prepares to hear the historic Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases. While the plaintiffs in these cases are Mennonites and evangelical Christians, opposition to the contraceptive mandate was largely spearheaded by the Catholic bishops. Several key cases of Catholic non-profits, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, are making their way through the lower courts and may well en…

A Pro-Patriarchy Argument in All Its Glory

By Patricia Miller

…Timothy Belz of the Thomas More Society. Finally, an unvarnished pro-patriarchy argument in all its glory. The Becket Fund (the other conservative public interest law firm named after a martyred Thomas who was dispatched by a King Henry after an epic church-state battle) picked its plaintiffs with canny eye for obscuring the true nature of the suits: a hard-working entrepreneurial Christian couple who merely objected to the provision of “abortifa…

Irony of the Iranian Women’s Burqa Ban

By Shabana Mir

…compete in sports, are now the symbols of political tension and cultural warfare. Crush the hijabi and you have dealt another resounding slap to Osama—oh, wait, he’s too dead to feel the slap. As Every-Muslim-Woman, I’m bored. I am bored to tears of the head-cover or veil being the cynosure of the global gaze. I am embarrassed for the community of nations that, like a broken record or a doddering old fellow, cannot stop droning on and on about “I…

Already Beatified by the Right for Surviving an Assassination Attempt, Must We All Pray for Donald Trump?

By Daniel Schultz

…ughts and prayers” indeed. So if it takes the former president many more years of golf in Saudi Arabia (or another, similar nation without an extradition treaty) to ensure that these concerns about democracy are addressed well then so be it. I’m not above a bit of strategic prayer (and whether you’re a praying person or not, I hope you’re not either). One of my touchstone thinkers, Walter Brueggemann, calls prayer “the theological imagination of t…

Does Atheism Have a Misogyny Problem?

By Julia Galef

…erreacting. He left a comment on another popular atheist blog, PZ Myers’ Pharyngula, sarcastically comparing Watson’s experience to the much more serious problems faced by women in the Muslim world. He then followed it up with two more comments insisting that “zero bad” had happened to her in that elevator. An outpouring of thousands of comments as well as additional posts from popular atheist bloggers like Phil Plait, Greta Christina, and Jen McC…

Sin is Not a Crime: A Conversation with Patrick Cheng

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…o have this dialogue so it no longer becomes a cringe-worthy moment whenever sin is mentioned. Once there is a way of talking about sin that people are comfortable and confident with people can move forward. We can acknowledge our corporate sinfulness and move on from there. If you think one particular sin is worse than another, that’s not what we need to talk about. We should be talking about how we all can get to grace and salvation. It can also…

Secular End Times & Apocalyptic ‘Roosters’

By Gordon Haber

…ther.) Landes envisions the historical treatment of apocalyptic time as a barnyard, achieved only when “roosters” (messianic or prophetic figures, like Jesus or Mohammed) win over the public. However, the historical influence of roosters has been dismissed or downplayed (like that of self-proclaimed messiah Sabbatei Tsevi—until Gershom Scholem came along), since their stories are usually recorded by anti-apocalyptic “owls.” “Bats” are the subseque…

Neil Gorsuch Shows How Donald Trump Loses (Some) White Evangelical Christians

By John Stoehr

…reason for leaving. White evangelicals taking the teachings of Jesus to heart are not who we should be talking about when asking what Trump could possibly do to alienate white evangelical Christians. The vast majority of that cohort is willing to eat virtually any insult as long as Trump sees to it that the right people are punished and, more importantly, that they can do the punishing. This is why Monday’s ruling by the US Supreme Court, which e…

Why Peter Beinart is Wrong on Democrats and Anti-Mormonism

By Joanna Brooks

…Republicans (as though the question can be treated in the abstract when a particular Mormon, a Republican, is actually participating the race). He then meanders into half-cooked theorizations of what constitutes “anti-Mormon bigotry,” suggesting that “African-Americans, gays, and lesbians are more anti-Mormon” because they use “the church’s historic (and even present-day) intolerance to justify intolerance.” There are many problems with Beinart’s…