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At the UN, Conservative Christian Agenda Cloaked in Human Rights Language

…rage sexual relations and childbearing outside of the marital bond, and to promote the institution of marriage as the best environment for children. The article on religion is noteworthy for affirming a positive “Right to a Religion”—in contrast to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, the standard in accepted international instruments. Here again, the Declaration cites the UDHR but omits its crucial inclusion of the “freedom to change” be…

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Progressive Christians: Don’t Look to the Bible For Abortion Rights Arguments — Women’s Autonomy is Not a Biblical Value

…eech. The notion that a man speaking to a woman shows that he values her encodes a regime of masculine privilege and feminine deference. The (privileged) man is entitled to speech and the woman is expected to be gratified to get to listen to him. The man is a knower, an explainer, a holder forth,⁠ while the woman must see it as a privilege that she’s spoken to rather than ignored.⁠ She’s expected to give her attention to a man as though doing so w…

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Conservatives, Messianic Jews, and the Jews

…ited for Israel and other Christian Zionist groups “the Jews’ and Israel’s best friends in the world,” also tried to blame liberals, not Messianic Jews, for challenges to Judaism. “For 40 years I have argued that Jews for Jesus pose little or no danger to Jewish survival,” Prager wrote. “We Jews should be preoccupied with all the Jews for Nothing, the Jews for anti-Zionism, the Jews for radical Leftism.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again h…

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#MeToo and the Problem with the “The Billy Graham Rule”

…sex are threats to powerful men’s reputations. In such a circumstance, the best solution is sex-based segregation. But what Graham, Pence, and their ilk fail to understand is that neither women nor sexual desire are the problem; the problem is the abuse of male power. This is why women fear confronting powerful men, or simply men who have power over them. It’s easier to claim that sexual desire is inherently dangerous than to hold powerful men acc…

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Capricology: Divine Madness

…n spend time together in the Dive smoking a hallucinatory substance which, best we can tell so far, seems to be legal—if not exactly respectable—in this society. Of course, you’ve heard the joke that you can tell you are watching a cable show if the sympathetic characters are using drugs. This imagery is still not going to be appearing on the major networks. I also continue to be very interested in some of the representations of games in the serie…

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FX’s ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ Adaptation Rejects Reductive Elements of Krakauer’s Book, But Confirms That ‘Mormonism Breeds Dangerous Men’

…o decades than Krakauer’s riveting tale. It appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list for weeks in 2003 and remains a top seller nineteen years later. Other than the Book of Mormon itself, Under the Banner of Heaven has likely shaped more Americans’ minds about the LDS faith than any other book. Rumors concerning a film adaptation appeared almost immediately, but the story will finally make its dramatic appearance as a true-crime miniseries…

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Election Reporters: Here’s Why Simply Descriptors Like ‘Christians’ Can Have Enormous Consequences

…e; so subtle in fact that you might’ve missed it altogether. Despite their best efforts to depict themselves as speaking to and for Christians at large, neither Turning Point USA nor Donald Trump cares about more than a relatively small portion of the religion’s adherents. That distinction becomes extremely important in light of the growing sense among many expert observers that Trump’s rhetoric is increasingly authoritarian. Let’s face it: it’s p…

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Do Not Arrest the Pope: New Atheists’ Call for the Pope’s Arrest Isn’t Likely to Produce Justice

…gation, the truth is that neither of these things is likely to happen. The best we can hope for is that more praiseworthy impulses within the Church will prevail—impulses to treat this crisis as a wake-up call, as a call to seriously introspect about the reasons why child sexual abuse is so rampant and the cover-ups so pervasive. We can hope that church leaders will begin to more seriously reflect on the dangers of caring more about the Church’s r…

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The Wounded People of God

…or healing for parishioners, but realized his position perhaps was not the best one from which he could provide solace or healing given this particular situation. So he asked me and another colleague to intervene. It was a tough but rewarding experience, one I carry with me whenever I speak or write on this issue. So understand, when I criticize the church and its authorities harshly, it is because I feel the pain of those who suffered abuse, and…

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Polygamy, Genius, and the Origin of Religion

…. In that light, an argument like Barash’s sounds hopelessly retrograde at best, and intolerant at worst. But just because a question is uncomfortable doesn’t mean that it should be taboo. Evolution clearly made male and female bodies different. Human brains are subject to evolution, too. It’s possible that natural selection has encoded different behavior patterns in men and women. These differences could show up in proclivities toward certain beh…

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