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The Journalist and the Bishops: CNS Editor Fired For Tweeting Opposition to LGBT Discrimination

By Patricia Miller

…Catholic bishops’ manipulation of the principle of “religious freedom” is, look no further than last week’s dismissal of Tony Spence, the editor in chief of Catholic News Service, for tweeting his opposition to bills that would codify LGBT discrimination. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops built its “religious liberty” campaign, which was largely responsible for creating the broad, corrupted definition of religious liberty that has resulted i…

Will Declining Numbers of White Evangelicals Change the Senate?

By Sarah Posner

…d look no further than Congress to recognize that there may be strength in numbers, but numbers alone do not automatically translate into strength.” And numbers alone do not automatically translate into weakness. The religious right spent decades building get-out-the-vote operations and candidate recruitment and training grounds. Those efforts do not vanish with demographic changes, particularly if evangelical turnout is outsized compared to other…

“I Think the White Evangelical Church is Dead”: Dr. Russell Jeung on ‘Guilt’ vs. ‘Shame’ and Decolonizing Asian-American Christianity

By Deborah Jian Lee

…y find themselves doing a more Zen-like Buddhist practice. My research has looked at what a lot of second-generation Asian Americans are doing. For example, Vietnamese-Americans who are Catholics are also developing home shrines, a practice of honoring ancestors. Their approach revealed how they were doing it in a hybridized way—embracing both the traditional and the personally meaningful. On their shrine they’d place something traditional, like j…

Neither The Joker Nor Godlessness Drove Batman Shooting

By Jeffrey Scholes

…trayed in The Dark Knight? There already are. Just look on YouTube for the number of videos where teens are dressing up as and imitating the lines of the Joker. Even more seriously, however, there have been crimes committed since the film’s release where the criminals have dressed in Joker makeup. The film would likely not be dangerous for those well-grounded in morality; but for the many in today’s world who have not received the moral training t…

Does ISIS Vindicate Pope Benedict’s Islam Remarks, as George Weigel Believes?

By Scott C. Alexander

…r 2006. My question to Mr. Weigel is: “To whom does the Regensburg address look so different now?” Surely he’s not claiming that those who harbor a deep-seated prejudice against Islam see the address any differently? I would venture to say those who were, and still are, convinced that Islam is at best a bastardized version of Christianity with an exceptionally defective violence “gene” in its religious DNA (and at worst a satanic heresy bent on de…

How Mega-Macho-Pastor Mark Driscoll Helps Explain Trump’s Evangelical Support

By Jessica Johnson

…o artificially elevate sales of his book Real Marriage in order to achieve bestselling author status. While many “Trumpvangelicals” justify their allegiance by stating that they are electing a president not a pastor, it is in fact to a celebrity pastor such as Driscoll that we should look to understand how, rather than why, evangelicals would choose a man who bullies people then refuses to repent and who equates entrepreneurial success with perpet…

Unified Catholic Opposition to Trump’s “Muslim Ban” is Wishful Thinking

By Patricia Miller

…ers who are “issuing strongly worded statements condemning” the ban. But a look at the actual statements, and who is making them, shows that the idea of unified Catholic opposition to Trump is largely wishful thinking. With a few exceptions, the opposition isn’t particularly “fierce.” Nor, given the type of cleavages the church has helped foster among its own constituents, is it likely to be particularly effective in terms of rallying Catholic opp…

Talking Prop. 8: Of Rites and Rights

By Peter Laarman

…s (McConnell, Graham, McCain, Grassley) to hold Congressional hearings to “look into” the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in America. They’re playing ugly politics with anti-immigrant feeling. They won’t get far. However fuzzy and vague most people’s recollection of the Constitution may be, and however desperate we are for a civics renewal at this point in our history, there’s still an important residuum of understanding t…

Enlightenment Values Aren’t Just the Solution to Racism, They’re Also the Problem

By Hussein Rashid

…e directed at other nations, or to internal populations. One simply has to look at a film like Birth of a Nation to see how this works. The way in which police tactics are used against black bodies in America is enabled by Enlightenment thinking in the sense that it’s a reflection of the different ideas of who is truly a citizen, and therefore who’s allowed the rights of protection of the state. It’s not just law enforcement, but the entire penal…

Roy Moore’s Order To Stop Gay Marriage Licenses: A Case of Flawed Theology

By Marcia Pally

…llars are spent on more legal fees, these matters need to be given a fresh look where we are open about our ethics and about what motivates us. Convictions and feelings are important but they are not biblical authority. So, let’s look at that biblical authority and the passages most frequently cited against homosexuality, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. They call male homosexual relations toevah, which has unfortunately been mistranslated as “abominati…