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Mormons’ Puzzling Indifference to Easter

…nothing in our meetings that day directly acknowledged the atonement, the crucifixion, or the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Mormon indifference to Easter can puzzle pretty much everyone who stops to think about it: Mormons, post-Mormons, non-Mormons. I doubt mine is the only post today or this week addressing the strange situation. (Jana Riess wrote about it on Ash Wednesday.) The church has created media to encourage people to think more of Easte…

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Would Gandhi Disband Occupy?

…he title he chose for his autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth. He believed firmly that truth can be found only through the open-minded attitude of experimentation—which means that truth, insofar as any human can grasp it, is inherently fluid. Today’s fixed set of demands may easily seem like tomorrow’s folly. Gandhi’s program was especially vague in the earliest years of his work, in South Africa. To demand a detailed list of spe…

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Pastors Urged to Defy IRS to Defeat Evil, Hitlerian Obama

…campaigns designed to influence the outcome of the November elections. On today’s call, John Hagee insisted that St. Paul had instructed Christians to stand on the evil day, and that “the evil day is here.” He cited Bonhoffer looking the evil of Naziism in the face in Hitler’s Germany. Americans, he said are being “trampled” by the “secular left” because churches and pastors have “stopped defending the truth fearlessly.” Hagee said “We as a peopl…

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Your Uterus Is “An Important Subject” About Which Your Fellow Citizens “Wish To Converse”

…rence Thomas, resentfully complained that because of the narrowness of the ruling, “Today’s opinion carries forward this Court’s practice of giving abortion-rights advocates a pass when it comes to suppressing the free-speech rights of their opponents.” Despite the grumbling concurrence, abortion opponents are celebrating a victory for the free speech rights of their sidewalk counselors, even portraying women who have been or will be talked out of…

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Fear, Guns, and the (Unwinnable) War Against Death: A Letter to My Fellow Americans

…ore. More than that, the nature of everyday life for most of us in America today is deadly for the world around us. The machines that facilitate our daily life exploit the fossil fuel spoils of the underworld, slowly turning the planet into a kind of living hell. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose knew that, even if many of us choose to ignore that it’s happening; phenomena like mass species extinctions are affecting us deeply. Rose argued that in t…

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Why Has the Critique of Hypocrisy Run Out of Steam?

…e laud them for excellence in pretense. But it wasn’t so good for the real world. All the world might be a stage, and humans merely players, but Jesus’s critique seemed to suggest that some were acting for the purpose of deceiving their fellow actors, or even God himself. The critique of hypocrisy as a rhetorical weapon is indigenous to the Christian tradition, even to the point of being serviceable in the critique of other Christians. A famous Am…

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Who Gets Paid to Make America Hate? The Roots of the Islamophobia Network

…tes faces shifting economic and geopolitical patterns, the Muslim-majority world will become increasingly important to the direction the world takes.  That also includes the global relevance of democratic institutions, which is good for us, since right now the Western world is economically troubled, and challenged by rising authoritarian powers.   Arab and Muslim countries worlds are pushing strongly for democracy, democratic inclusion, and fair p…

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After Embracing Female Bishop, Pope Spins Again on Women’s Ordination

…ing able to do “many things better than men,” as he did on the papal plane today, why can’t he conceive of one of those things being the priesthood? Pope Francis repeated again today his idea of the “feminine dimension” of the Catholic church being represented by Mary, and also said once again that Mary is “more important” to the spirituality of the church than the apostles on Pentecost. What the pope is neglecting to acknowledge, however, is that…

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Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

…ikened to “Oriental,” “Asiatic,” “Turkish,” and “Mohammedan” peoples. Even today, more than 120 years after the prophet Wilford Woodruff officially disavowed the practice of polygamy, the media routinely conflates the LDS Church with Mormon fundamentalists (more properly called fundamentalist believers in late-period Joseph Smith). In this historical context, The Book of Mormon is light, sweet stuff. It demonstrates the attenuation of anti-Mormoni…

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