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Are Christians Theologically Prepared to Accept Torture?

…government uses a version of atonement theology to sanction torture and abuse: soldiers and military police are ordered to use “harsh techniques to gain information to save lives”; they “felt pressure to obtain information that could help save the lives of American soldiers.” [1] Might atonement theologies and images of the crucifixion prepare Christians to see torture as salvific? After my presentation, a woman from the audience spit in my face….

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Guns and the Wyoming Legislator Proposing the Shari’ah Law Ban

…ess to translate the Nazi Gun Control Act of 1938 into English so he could use it for the U.S. Gun Control Act of 1968, and more generally insists that the citizenry needs to be armed against government “tyranny,” which can lead to genocide. This sort of conspiracy theory is not unlike those being promoted by far right Christian groups after the Tucson shootings. When the group’s founder, Aaron Zelman, died in December, he was praised by one-time…

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Catholic Church is Lucky it’s Just Same-Sex Marriage

…n said,  “Hi. I’m so and so, and I’m a lesbian.” Then she paused. “Well, I used to be a lesbian,” she added, “but my partner had a sex-change operation, so now I’m not exactly sure what I am.” And that was just the beginning. Next there was a newspaper article about women Olympic athletes being eliminated from competition because tests revealed that they were genetically male, something about which they themselves hadn’t a clue. Then there was Suz…

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Focus on the Family Goes to Bat for Bullies

…man beings are created in God’s image and they deserve to be protected because they are a human being uniquely created by God with innate dignity and worth, and not because of how they identify sexually.” Honestly, could she even hear herself? If she and FotF truly believed that, and encouraged conservative Christian parents to actually teach that to their potential bullies in training, then there would be no need for anti-bullying legislation. Bu…

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Thoreau’s Ferocious Critique of Philanthropy Does Not Make Him “Selfish”

…eeder.” Thoreau’s point was that the capitalist’s philanthropy wasn’t much better. The hypocritical cover of philanthropic enterprises remains in use today. The travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux wrote earlier this month in the New York Times about communities across the South where factories have closed as jobs went overseas, a shift that has been broadcast as part of an effort “to uplift impoverished people” around the world. But such heroi…

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Spinning Ft. Hood

…en if others see them as outsiders, they are more worried about creating a better America. They believe they are better than what Maj. Hasan represents: Among those attending Friday prayers at the Killeen mosque was Sgt. Fahad Kamal, 26, an Army medic who wore his Airborne uniform, and later he said he was angered on several levels. “I want to believe it was the individual, and not the religion, that made him do what he did,” said Sergeant Kamal,…

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How New Religions Are Made

…ontinued for five more chapters concerning interactions and race relations between white and Black Jews during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Thankfully, Oxford University Press’ readers reined me in, and I was left with the much more compact, and much more readable text as it stands today, which focuses on the period from the nineteenth century to the 1930s. Some scholars may wonder how large these groups were, especially since African Am…

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Blaming the Listener: NPR’s Non-Apology

…information in the beginning of the piece rather than the end, would have better served our listeners because it would have given them more context to understand what they were hearing.” Schumacher-Matos puts a fine point on it by concluding: “Spiegel and Gudenkauf clearly worked hard on this story. They simply made some wrong assumptions about what most of us know about sexuality and conversion.” But they should have worked harder—the fault here…

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Apocalypse Earth: What Would Jesus Say About the Approaching Environmental “End Times”?

…g other things, I’m ready for a teaching on global population that doesn’t use abortion or birth control as an excuse for denying the obvious: that our species has now outgrown its box. I’m tired of pontiffs and priests and religious pundits who publicly strain gnats out of their drinking water, but privately think nothing of swallowing a camel down whole. The good news is, if Jesus is coming to preach the Sermon on the Moon, they may all be out o…

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How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

…have asked what the term “evangelical” itself might be a metaphor for. Because regardless of the actual content of any specific definition of evangelicalism, the term is ultimately a social construction not unlike race, gender, and religion itself. And like all social constructions, evangelicalism’s meaning and use impacts how we understand and see the world. So, if we want to stop being surprised by the things that evangelicals do, it’s time to s…

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