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What do the January 6 Commission, Covid Deaths and Gun Massacres All Have in Common? God’s Chosen

…iven by God to his chosen, which is to say, to white people. To many white Americans, the election of a Black president was, quite literally, a robbery. The Second Amendment can therefore be understood as a remedy to the crime, as a means of restoring a religious covenant, the Constitution itself, which for many white Americans is “linked to white nationalism and the idea that God has ordained this country for whites and therefore licenses white n…

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Pope Francis Has Painted Himself into a Corner on Women Deacons

…s” conundrum Parallel to the diaconal growth is the steady increase in the number of women engaged in ministries of all sorts. Whether in campus ministry or prison work, in parishes where they now outnumber priests in the U.S., in religious communities or religious education, women around the world do an increasingly large share of the Roman Catholic Church’s ministry without being ordained or having decision-making power. No wonder it occurred to…

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As Tensions Escalate in the Balkans, the West Could Hand Putin a Valuable Weapon

…hodox Christian territory is, in most cases, as recent or more recent than American chattel slavery. And only the ignorant or ideologically motivated (i.e. racist) would argue that American chattel slavery has no effect today. And the failure of the West to understand this recent history and to take it into account in the analysis of current events is the very opening that Russia is looking for when it seeks to wield influence in places like Serbi…

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The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

…the fiddle while Rome burns—a fiery critique of him golfing while numerous Americans, especially poor and racially marginalized Americans—died from COVID-19. Reed couldn’t associate Trump with a notorious persecutor of Christians, so he opted for Tiberius instead. This is an undeniable historical error. I wonder if Reed’s appeal to Tiberius might even have been influenced by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s bestselling book, Killing Jesus (2013)….

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Catholic Sex Teaching is No Laughing Matter

…upsurge. At the same time that anti-gay violence is growing in Africa, the number of African Christians, including Roman Catholics, continues to increase. Catholics now comprise twenty percent of the population of the entire continent, or 185 million people.  It would, of course, be unfair to blame increasing anti-gay violence in Africa entirely, or even primarily, on the Roman Catholic Church, given the pivotal roles played in this crisis by some…

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Death Without Religion

…ble assertion to make in such a tendentious book. Perhaps there is a small number of Americans losing their lives at the hands of hasty harvesters; even a very small number would be too high. But I had a hard time summoning any outrage. In the end I learned much more from Kagan—ironically because his aims are in a way more modest. He wants to convince you of his physicalist stance; however, he doesn’t want to tell you how to reconcile with death….

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Do Atheists Belong in the Interfaith Movement?

…nt and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, an organization I have worked with a number of times (I recently accepted an invitation to join their Speakers’ Bureau) and whose “Living Without Religion” campaign I greatly admire. In his blog, Lindsay wrote that “it’s nice that some politicians are finally willing to acknowledge our existence, but are we so desperate for acceptance that we’ll allow others to condescendingly misdescribe us as adherents of a…

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Infanticide Still Not a Growing Movement: 30 Years of Pro-Life Fudging

…h” abortion. As Snopes rather gently phrased it, McArdle’s report “lacks a number of key credibility markers.” Or any, really. Of course, one evidence-free bit of “news” is not in itself notable in this media landscape. But this isn’t the first time this rumor has been reported as fact and acceptable uncritically. Earlier this year there were a rush of such reports by conservative commentators such as the American Conservative‘s Rod Dreher, Nation…

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The 50 Shades of Evangelicalism

…f the population is the conservative impulse to mix religion and politics. Americans, they suggest, oppose the mingling of the two. And yet Campbell and Putnam’s own data show that the majority of Americans consider themselves religious. Perhaps what many actually oppose is the way certain types of evangelicals mix their religion and politics. R. R. Reno, writing at the blog of conservative Catholic publication First Things, argued in response to…

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Right Wingers Say “Gay” is Out, But Try Putting “Unnatural Vice” On a Bumper Sticker

…eny minority of people may take away their right to tell gays and lesbians that God will send them to hell for all eternity — out of love, mind you. But, then again, anti-gay Evangelicals have a right to be afraid. After all, researchers say the actual number of Evangelicals may well be “as small as 7 percent of the total adult population.” Which means Evangelicals know just how effective a small number of people can be at taking away the rights o…

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