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Ideology is More Than Skin Deep: Why I Can’t Get Along To Go Along

…ut understand, first of all, that there are many others speaking their own language who will not defer to your own. In fact, they might be quite hostile to it. More to the point—and this is what never seems to sink in with the “Come, Let Us Reason Together” crowd—their interests may diverge from your own. Put differently, ideological differences are more than skin deep. The competing interests they manifest are real divisions of money and power an…

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New Poll Reveals That Anti-Trans Rhetoric isn’t Just Affecting Republicans and White Evangelicals

…mple, 86% of White evangelicals said there are only two genders, with that number rising to 92% in 2023. The report also states, “Among White Christian groups, White evangelical Protestants (82%) and Latter-day Saints (72%) are much more likely than White Catholics (51%) and White mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (50%) to strongly feel there are only two genders.” None of this is particularly surprising, but what I do find both surprising and…

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Newsweek’s Strange Faces of the Christian Right List

…ople who aren’t associated with the Christian right. Ten is a pretty small number to best represent a movement Newsweek describes as “changing and growing more diffuse, even as it remains a potent force in American politics.” While some of the picks seem obvious (Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-choice group Susan B. Anthony List, or Jim Daly, the new head of Focus on the Family, or Robert George mastermind of the Manhattan Declaration) legal sch…

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American Christianity Is Changing Fast: Five Stories to Watch in 2016

…ken a much more adversarial stance to LGBT acceptance. However, increasing numbers of evangelical churches are accepting LGBT individuals as members. This development is not without its opponents, however. Many evangelical organizations—most significantly colleges, universities and seminaries—are mobilizing to retain their “religious right” to discriminate against LGBT individuals. More than 30 evangelical higher education institutions have petiti…

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The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

…ing themselves to the values Columba exemplified. West of Presbyterian Scotland, north of Methodist Wales, and east of Catholic Ireland, Iona was supposedly the womb for a different type of Christianity—an egalitarian, progressive, visionary faith in opposition to the religion as it evolved. In Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation, J. Phillip Newell writes movingly about how this is a tradition that has “some important contributions to mak…

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Bush Has Helped the Scarecrow of American Religion

…st countries to recognize American independence. No, the sophistication of language I refer to is the one of nuance. The curse that has plagued the coverage of Islam since the Iranian Revolution, that it is one monolithic religion, is really the plague on religion coverage in general. Over these last years, as the religious right has risen in power, as it attempts to actually create a monolithic understanding of Christianity, Christians have fough…

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When Corporations are “Persons” Under the Law: The Real Problem With Health Care

…were more mundane and predictable: Section Two redefined how we distribute numbers of representatives state-by-state, by “counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed”; and Section Three excluded from future service any member of the government who had previously sworn an oath of office to the State and then joined the Confederacy in open rebellion. Predictable stuff, really. After winning the War, Washington int…

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

…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 revelations of episcopal misfeasance threaten…

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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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The Sacred and the Dead: Truckin’ as a New American Pilgrimage

…the Grateful Dead collectively formed an intentionally itinerant community numbering in the tens of thousands, with their own customs, vernacular, art, and economy. In his explanation of the lure of the Grateful Dead to thousands of Deadheads around the country, Garcia ruminated, “maybe we’re just one of the last adventures in America.” Indeed, the promise of a great American adventure animated Deadheads to undertake an annual pilgrimage across th…

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