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Please Reverend, Do Something About the Fat People

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…e—that it’s not a moral failure to have a big body, with or without health problems; but to hear “obese” and think “really unusually fat” is inaccurate. 3. It might be compelling if being obese necessarily made you unhealthy. But it doesn’t. The health outcomes related to body weight occur mostly at the extremes. Both extremes. The majority of people (you know, that high percentage of people in the middle of the bell curve, the ones we’re supposed…

Blankets, Booties, and Jesus: Spiritual War on the Uterus in Rick Perry’s Texas

By Sarah Posner

…to God’s will, but that it will cause them untold harm, from mental health problems to breast cancer, infertility, and even death. While medical evidence says otherwise, such falsehoods have been codified into law in Texas. Its 2003 “right to know” law, never challenged in court, requires doctors to “inform” women seeking abortions of a supposed link between abortion and a higher risk of breast cancer and future infertility, in addition to: “serio…

Pro-Life Rift in Ohio: Boon or Bust for Pro-Choice Movement?

By Katie Toth

…io has become for anti-choice organizers, where pro-choice senators are outnumbered by a ratio of 2-to-1. “It’s the strategy they disagree about, it’s not the goal,” she notes. “This is really… an indicator that in the last election, large anti-choice majorities were elected to the Ohio house and senate. People who want to outlaw abortion in our state have seen a real opportunity.” Gonidakis believes that Ohio has had a “banner year for the pro-li…

Did Jesus Help Ghanaian Women with Birth Control?

By Allie Carter

…lanation: …the Christian women were speaking directly to Jesus about their problems. He was, many of them may have felt, the first man ever to listen. This may have given them a language for speaking to mortal men as well, even about such sensitive matters as contraception. Notice that shift? “many of them may have felt” [emphasis mine]. It seems awfully curious that at the critical juncture – when Epstein makes the leap to the empowering nature o…

New Vatican Document Good News for Poor, Bad News for Tea Party

By Daniel C. Maguire

…ews for the Tea Party. It says we need globalized solutions for globalized problems; it favors a market economy but not this one; it calls for “supranational authority,” a healthy, non-tyrannical “world political authority” to tame the greed games that strip the poor and gorge the rich; it calls names, deriding “neoliberalism,” the Neocons’ Credo, as devoid of “moral perspective” and a writ for “collective greed.” It seeks to tax financial transac…

New Report: Young People Leaving Church for Science

By Paul Wallace

…science.” Accompanying this, are these sub-points with which a substantial number of interviewees agreed: “Christians are too confident they know all the answers”; “churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in”; “Christianity is anti-science”; and “[I am] turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate.” I was stunned. Not because this is news exactly, but because science rated its very own bullet point from this rather exte…

Yom Kippur Prayers for Corporate Atonement at Occupy Wall St.

By Sarah Posner

…fraud was rampant, and where caution was absent. Because of those external problems, many good hardworking people were steered, under a sort of duress, into financial doom while their futures were sold from the rich to the richer. Today, as we think about how commitments must be contemplated in the context of right and wrong, of earth and heaven, we know that those notes have no moral weight, that banks can’t and shouldn’t own the futures of peop…

#OccupyWallStreet and the Antichrist

By Sarah Posner

…That is perhaps a more complicated story, with two parts: the left’s real problems, as historian Michael Kazin observes in his essay in the Times yesterday, and the public perception of it, illuminated by reporter Will Bunch in his critique of media coverage of the #occupyWallStreet protests. Kazin, in his condensed history of the past glory of the left and what ails it now, identifies what the right has done successfully and the left has failed…

Judeo-Christian America: The Fall of the ‘Christian Nation’

By Edward J. Blum

…xclusion, and Protestant whiteness was often a key component. With greater numbers of Jews and Catholics on campus in the 1940s and 1950s, one fraternity even changed its charter to limit members to “Caucasian Christians.” Jews and Catholics challenged these discriminatory practices, but also defended their own autonomous organizations. As Schultz so nicely shows, fraternity struggles highlighted the problems of enforced integration. Jewish and Ca…

Atheist Rock Fest, Buddhist Geeks, Megachurch For Sale, Church Bans Fried Chicken

By Michael J. Altman

…usic minister that he was fired, the music minster responded with a taser. Problems continue to surround the Crystal Cathedral. Creditors say they will sue the megachurch if it blocks a sale of its large campus. Both Chapman University and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange upped their offers for the property to $50 and $53.6 million respectively. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz will not appear at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit after Cha…