Religion Dispatches
…made into a figurehead, for religious people, and in Lin’s case, for Asian-Americans too. If Lin stumbles—if he gets into a fight in a bar, or behaves inappropriately with women, or commits any number of minor sins which ordinary people get away with every day—he lets down not only himself and his family, but his faith community and the Asian-American (and to some extent Asian) community as a whole, which currently views him as a hero. Can you ima…
Read More…paint all pro-choice people with that brush.) The fact is, a whole lot of Americans find some abortions morally troubling, but are also troubled about the consequences of government intrusion into women’s reproductive decisionmaking. Which is a pretty nuanced way to look at, and it’s not one that is immediately friendly to personhood legislation. Secondly, it raises the question of whether we shall see a more general pushback against national gro…
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…s and from 7.0 to 9.5 percent for Hispanics, and by 2010 the proportion of Americans (irrespective of race) living in high-poverty neighborhoods was 15 percent. Further evidence of the growing social isolation of urban poor populations has been the resegregation of public schools. A 2014 report by The Economic Policy Institute states: “The typical black student now attends a school where only 29 percent of his or her fellow students are white, dow…
Read More…in Panama live in the major cities of Panama City and Colón, with smaller numbers in other provincial cities. The Panamanian government does not collect information on its religious composition, but a 2009 international report estimated the number of Muslims at around 24,000, comprising less than one percent of the country’s population. Most are of Lebanese, Palestinian or Indian descent. Though small, Panama’s Muslim community has grown increasi…
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…n times more people than watched the Democratic Presidential debates. That number, combined with 36 million liberal Protestants (with “growing irrelevancy”), is just a bit below the viewership for the Super Bowl. As to causes of decline, if we move to the margins of demonic institutions does this slow it down or speed it up? He calls for greater vitality on the left, and I agree that this is better than steering right or being tepid—but at best wh…
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…ed members of the SBOE. “The real movers and shakers in content,” as Hindu American Foundation spokesperson Murali Balaji notes, are “the real movers and shakers in content,” are the bloc of right-wing members, “who have made remarks questioning climate change, urging publishers to endorse ‘free market’ economics, and pushing for a Christianization of textbooks.” One way they control textbook content is through their handling of the public comment…
Read More…Having a husband meant that they could not give their ultimate all for the number one man on most African-American womens’ lips, and it’s not Denzel. It’s Jesus. For many women in churches like COGIC, being in love with Jesus means that most other men, whether desirable as a husband or not, stood in the way of the number one relationship. One person I interviewed even had a name for it: “being loosed” from your husband to do the Lord’s work. “Bein…
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…t the “Aerobics Center,” students filled out a computer card with their ID number, activity number, and the time, intensity, and distance of their workout. The data derived from the cards helped to determine grades. One student who had been forced to enroll in the Pounds Off Program said, “I’m really sad for the school. It has so much potential, so many positive things about it, but you can’t treat people this way… They treat you like you’re not c…
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…ay they “believe in God without a doubt,” broken down by generation: Gen Z numbers drop off precipitously since the late nineties. The second showed the number who say they “believe in some higher power.” Here, Gen Z showed an equally precipitous rise, since around 2012. Thompson’s tweet betrays some exasperation with the apparently contradictory results: “Depending on how you ask the question,” he wrote, Gen Z was either “leading a stunning athei…
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…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial clai…
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