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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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When Churches Do Business

…of faith,” Coakley said in a statement. “These laws also strike a balance between religious freedoms and the rights of individuals to be free from discrimination. In this case, we believe that this family was unfairly discriminated against by the diocese when it refused to sell them property based on their sexual orientation.” In her brief, Coakley said that religious organizations do not have to comply with antidiscrimination laws in matters rel…

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‘Do They Even Read the Bible?’ — Why Exposing White Evangelical Hypocrisy is a Dead End

…gelical hypocrisy is doomed to failure, but we keep doing it. We do it because it feels good. Letting off steam against a faceless digital avatar is really the lifeblood of social media after all. It also feels good to get the adulation that comes with a social media pile on. We feel good knowing that other people saw us challenging an enemy in public. But despite the momentary good feels, not much changes. What this social media trope should teac…

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Mass Bible-Based Sexual Dysfunction as Root of Culture Wars? Frank Schaeffer Breaks It Down

…ds a man of his first lover and evokes a longing that cuts to the heart. I used to think I’d someday sort out the difference between what I believe “for myself” and how I was conditioned to think. These days I don’t believe that clarity is possible. For one thing belief is a snapshot of just that day since beliefs change and we also change our minds. So instead I use the fundamentalist chains binding my brain as a point of creative departure, as t…

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