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Sharbat Gula’s Experience Exemplifies the ‘White Savior’ Lens Through Which Most Americans View Afghanistan

…a man without her or her parent’s consent is intertwined with the Pashtun code of conduct, as is the lack of direct eye contact between men and women. In 1984, as McCurry recounted to NPR, Sharbat Gula initially covered her face when he took her photo. It was her teacher who instructed her to uncover her face. She wasn’t even asked if she wanted to participate. Arguably, the teacher’s complicity must also be called into question. However, the pow…

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UPDATED: Oklahoma Personhood Bill Not Dead…

…d-down and unflinching personhood bill yet: the bill would amend the legal code to treat fetuses as persons at all stages of biological development. So what happened? Well, there was opposition, of course. People got nervous about the things that generally make a lot of people nervous about giving legal rights to fertilized eggs. What about in vitro fertilization? What about ectopic pregnancies? What about the liability of medical providers? The b…

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Catholic Bishops End Family Synod With Little To Say To Gays; World Congress of Families Has Plenty To Say, None of it Good; How Same-Sex Marriage Came to a Buddhist Temple in Japan; Global LGBT Recap

…donesia’s conservative Aceh province has enacted a strict Islamic criminal code, local government officials said late on Friday, criminalizing adultery, homosexuality, and public displays of affection outside of a legally recognized relationship. Aceh is the only province in the Muslim-dominated country to adhere to sharia, Islamic law, which puts it at odds with other provinces where the vast majority of the population practices a moderate form o…

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Where Christianity and Islam Collide

…al rule of law than the government does. [They] lay out a social and moral code that governs human interaction, and supplies a context for suffering and poverty, constructing a group identity through which followers can hope to secure their worldly needs, and find some certainty about the hereafter.” It follows that in such places, religion may be the only guiding principle, the only social, moral, even legal code to abide by. Somalia, for example…

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Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

…attacks. “I call on The Gambia to fulfil its international obligations to promote and protect the human rights of all persons without discrimination, to repeal all provisions of the Criminal Code that criminalize relations between consenting adults and to put in place an immediate moratorium on arrests on the basis of such laws,” the High Commissioner said. Amnesty International also sounded the alarm on Gambia this week, highlighting the detenti…

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Famous Atheists, Fat Ministers, Papal Tweets, and a Mega-Hoax

…atican, and the World Evangelical Alliance have worked together to issue a code for how Christians ought to evangelize. No word on how this code effects the use of Chick Tracts. A village in the Philippines celebrates its patron saint, John the Baptist, with a Mud People Festival. Reminds me of my weekend at Bonnaroo 2004. The Pope tweeted—from an iPad, no less. It’s all part of the Vatican’s new multimedia news portal, news.va. Biblical criticism…

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Black Women and the Sacred: With “Lemonade,” Beyoncé Takes Us to Church

…Black women, like Harriet Tubman, were often critical in leading people to freedom from bondage. Enslaved African Americans who became Christians were baptized by traditional doctrinal formulas. But, having endured the horror of the Middle Passage, black people had already been baptized by water and fire during their involuntary migration across the Atlantic Ocean. And this water imagery is not limited to the Christian imagination. “Lemonade” evok…

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Among the Problems with Trump’s Proposed Ban: Who is a Muslim?

…denying that Judaism is a religion (instead, it’s an ideology, or a legal code, or an international cabal), and emphasizing definitions of Judaism rooted in physical heritage. This nudge toward biology makes sense. For one thing, it’s easier to judge somebody’s identity based on ancestry than on beliefs and cultural traditions. The latter is pretty nebulous. The former is quantifiable. Also, bigots haven’t historically cared much about the person…

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International reax to US Marriage Ruling; Official violence at Turkey’s Pride; Marriage Advances in Mexico Over Church Objections; Global LGBT Recap

…e: Homosexuality decriminalized The BBC reports on the country’s new penal code, which drops the colonial-era law on “vices against nature,” making Mozambique “one of the few African countries where same-sex relationships are legal.” Analysis from BBC’s Milton Nkosi: Mozambique’s move to decriminalise homosexuality looks in step with recent changes elsewhere, such as Ireland and the US. But Mozambique is also following the likes of neighbouring So…

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An Untold Tale: American Fiction vs. The Religious Right

…rl Sagan, and Dan Brown’s popular religious mystery thriller, The Da Vinci Code. Sagan has a reputation as a proto-New Atheist, but his novel suggests he was intensely sympathetic to religious experience and authority. By the end of his novel he has his scientist protagonist embark on a career of “experimental theology” after she has discovers the “signature” of God in the very structure of the universe. At the same time, Sagan was not impressed b…

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