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The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

…o take their spiritual business elsewhere. We have seen an increase in the number of American politicians who are asked to remove themselves from communion lines and, recently, priests have even denied parishioners communion if they vote for a political candidate who favors abortion rights. This exclusion from the sacrament is essentially a form of excommunication. Dogma Over Diplomacy Ironically, at a time when many earnest believers are being tu…

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Is Twitter Doing Enough to Remove Extremist Content? An Ex-Employee Weighs In

…g to identify potentially radical organizations and individuals. The Green Number, or Numéro Vert, is a private telephone hotline in France where family and friends can report someone they fear may become radicalized. And in the U.K., Prevent is a program that essentially creates ‘trigger warnings’ for teachers and institutions to report the potential for radicalization. I do not mean to condemn or even criticize these programs, merely to point ou…

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Now That ‘Serial’ is Over: 2014’s Best Podcasts about Religion

…ical war between an Orthodox Jewish community and their Latino and African-American neighbors is a case study in religious pluralism (or the impossibility thereof). Our second category winner is the most popular podcast in history, the This American Life spin-off Serial, which just wrapped up its first season. Over twelve episodes Serial untangles the 1999 murder trial of Adnan Syed, a 17-year-old Baltimore Muslim who was accused of killing his ex…

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What do the January 6 Commission, Covid Deaths and Gun Massacres All Have in Common? God’s Chosen

…iven by God to his chosen, which is to say, to white people. To many white Americans, the election of a Black president was, quite literally, a robbery. The Second Amendment can therefore be understood as a remedy to the crime, as a means of restoring a religious covenant, the Constitution itself, which for many white Americans is “linked to white nationalism and the idea that God has ordained this country for whites and therefore licenses white n…

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Warships, Animals, Pubs Eligible For Blessings From Church of England, But Not Same-Sex Couples; Global LGBT Recap

…el Lavers that he sees his job as “an engaging process with all actors.” A number of anti-equality countries, cheered on by U.S. Religious Right groups, tried multiple times to derail Muntarbhorn’s position, which was created by the Human Rights Council last year. More from the Blade: Muntarbhorn in 2006 co-chaired the meeting that led to the adoption of the Yogyakarta Principles, a set of recommendations on the application of international human…

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Prisoners In the Hands of an Angry God: A Conversation About Religion and Reform

…justice system. It’s not just that American prisons hold disproportionate numbers of African Americans. It’s that this racial composition created public support for, or at least indifference towards, “tough on crime” and “law and order” policies. Politicians have been able to pass harsh sentencing laws and build more prisons in part because deeply entrenched racial prejudices make the general public less likely to sympathize with the low-income A…

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‘Religious Freedom’ Rally Sets Stage for 1st Amendment Collision

…peddled by the Catholic Bishops and their supporters. Nettina claimed the number of abortions increase with greater access to contraceptives, a trope commonly used to assert that contraception fails and therefore does not decrease the number of unintended pregnancies. This claim echoes statements made by the Bishops themselves, as well as anti-contraception groups, that birth control doesn’t work and is harmful to women’s health. Hagen recommende…

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My Womb for His Purposes: The Perils of Unassisted Childbirth in the Quiverfull Movement

…the babies” themselves, both saving money and demonstrating their faith. A number of Quiverfull families follow a similar arc (as had Garrison) graduating from conventional hospital births—often where mothers felt pushed into a birth plan they didn’t desire—to midwife-assisted births at home, to the final challenge of unattended home births. It’s a logical extreme of the movement whose naturalistic bent actually overlaps with the back-to-the-land,…

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Post-Election, “Is The Black Church Dead?” Redux

…s mobilization, voter apathy, and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first African-American Republican to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction. (He beat out Strom Thurmond’s son in the primaries.) Iraq war veteran Allen West will be headed t…

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Growing Up Cult: A Memoir of Life with Sri Chinmoy

…xperiments), she began to question the idea of devotion to a guru. After a number of attempts to leave, she broke free of the group at age twenty-five. I recently caught up with Tamm to talk about Sri Chinmoy’s death, her use of the word “cult,” and what her spiritual life looks like today. ** Did it make a difference to his followers that Sri Chinmoy was from India? Did it give him extra authority? In the late 1960s, there was a trend to look to…

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