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To Get Through This Time We’ll Have to Shred the ‘Racial Contract’ and Choose Solidarity Over Sacrifice

…ight and Marketplace, asked “What is a human life worth?” Acting as modern day sages they assured anxious readers that yes, many corporations, institutions, and government regulators engage in a cost-benefit analysis and arrive at the value of a “statistical life.” In the midst of a pandemic, when many people are hungry for leadership and willing to “listen to the data” and “be guided by science,” the appeal is understandable. It’s also mistaken….

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Are You There God? It’s Us, Googling

…ion in “Google searches for churches,” yet more evidence of the increasing number of “nones,” or that “searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere.” Other patterns are more jarring: “Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell,” he writes. Each month, on average, 422 people in th…

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Can the Catholic Church Survive Trump?

…ining a prohibition on public funding of abortions justifies support for today’s Republican Party. But bishops should be wary of such a judgment. Today’s Republican Party is not an appropriate or reliable vehicle for the advancement of Catholic teaching in the medium and long run because of the simple but profound fact that no American political party ever is such a vehicle or ever will be. But the association with Trump leaves a particularly dark…

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A Debate Rages in India Over Conversion, Secularism, and “Spiritual Violence”

…it is having on the Indian social fabric. It’s a conversation Uganda and a number of African nations have not had—which is having devastating consequences for the their LGBT communities. As scholar and social activist Jim Perkinson has reminded us, countries such as India are only a microcosm of the worldwide impact of missionary activity. “The effect on native people of predatory proselytization is typically cultural alienation, a growing sense o…

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False Saviors: Trump, Cruz, and the Gospel of the Quick Fix

…nted for 60% of employment in 1979 accounted for only 46% by 2012; and the number of persons not in the labor force is growing. While some are getting richer, the numbers tell us, middle income earners are hobbled by shrinking purchasing power, disappearing job opportunities, and increasingly out-of-reach education. This is problem enough for the many who work hard and can’t figure out why they’re “losing ground,” as Pew wrote. Add to that fears o…

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And What of the Non-Jewish Jews?

…ecently being “Jewish” was a liability and anti-semitism was palpable, the number of non-Jews today who identify as Jewish seems historically distinctive. We could, perhaps, point to the so-called “fearers of heaven,” an undocumented community of Hellenes in late antiquity who lived in large Jewish population centers, apparently lived partially as Jews, and had some status in the Jewish community. But today’s non-Jewish Jews aren’t identifying as…

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There’s Something Rotten in Ireland

…se traced back to the time of Jesus himself. The Palestinian weekend is Friday and Sunday. In addition to being the world’s most annoying and dissatisfying weekend schedule (there should be an award for that, or maybe financial compensation), the days reflect the primary religious affiliations of Palestinians—Muslim (Friday) and Christian (Sunday).  Why would Christian Palestinians want to “lynch” Jesus? Or perhaps the embassy’s unknown provocateu…

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Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

…its annual summer meeting in Seattle (to be live-streamed, starting Wednesday, June 15). The bishops will take up a number of issues, from the revised liturgy to assisted suicide, but their conversations are sure to be dominated by an issue that has been dogging them since the mid-1980s: sexually abusive priests and the bishops who enabled them. Ten years after Cardinal Bernard Law became the poster bishop for failed religious leadership, new rev…

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Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

…basal ganglia, and other brain regions have been proposed to accomplish a number of specific functions.  Imagine, for example, working intently on some task until you notice that your stomach is rumbling and that the daylight has shifted. You think back to when you last ate, gauge how long you’ve been working, and give yourself five minutes to finish up before having a light snack, so as not to ruin your dinner. An MRI scan of this thought proces…

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Size Matters According to New Study

…media:  “Study suggests ‘born again’ believers have smaller brains” (USA Today)      “Study suggests ‘born again’ believers have smaller brains” (Beliefnet)       “Born-again Christians have smaller brains” (Houston Chronicle)  In fact, that’s a somewhat selective list of stories on the findings of a highly selective study. Involving less than three hundred people, the study looked at the brain volume of a group of people it divvied up according t…

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