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Wesolowski Sexual Abuse Case a New Approach or Same Old Same Old?

…ents but whose accountability to the larger church is nil. Hey, afternoons free for drinks and a little action, I bet there’s no trouble finding applicants for these jobs. Second, who pays for this kind of busy work? This nuncio is reported to have had a “stately residence and access to a beach house.” I suppose it gets a little lonely rattling around the mansion, and God knows what went on in the beach house. But mostly this is one of those Catho…

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Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

…now. Not only is she formerly President of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim organization in North America, but she is a religious scholar, author, and professor of Islamic studies whose dissertation examined Islam and slavery. Muhammad permitted slavery, and sexual relations were permitted between a man and a female slave as a possibility. But rape never was. How, I wondered, can this possibly be considered morally acceptab…

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The Problem of Evil in Free Market Theology

…ro-business wing of the Republican Party—with its unwavering commitment to free markets, deregulation, extended tax cuts, and an image of America as a providential city on a very wealthy hill—suddenly appears more clearly in its true light. They are the Gnostics, the elite heretics, whereas the Social Democrats are ironically true heirs to an orthodox gospel of compassionate care for the least among us. And in the egregiously hierarchical world of…

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Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

…also why dissatisfied customers at restaurants want to get their dish for free, or get a free glass of wine, or a free dessert, because that balances out the input-output equation. So if the customer service agent gives you something, then you feel compensated, then you’re okay, and it’s not such a cognitive puzzle, and also not such a frustration to deal with the amorphous agent of the airline as a whole. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the custo…

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Confront Death by Avoiding Fritos: The Gluten Lie, Fad Diets, & Foodie Faith

…or our own culture. People ask me, what’s the harm? Why not just go gluten free? And the answer is that going gluten free has all sorts of effects. It affects your relationship with your friends and family. It affects your relationship with your own past and foods that you love. While there might be some culture in which celebratory foods don’t typically contain gluten, that’s not our culture. Do you think there’s an incentive to setting yourself…

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Original Spin: Progressives Dismiss Conservative Theology at Their Peril

…es do, I suspect—then Eisenhower would surely have agreed with DeMint: “America works, freedom works, when people have that internal gyroscope that comes from a belief in God.” The “internal gyroscope” is nothing but the willed commitment to maintain self-discipline in the face of every temptation to selfishness. Without it, Ike would have agreed, “you no longer have the capacity to live as a free person”; you’ll have to submit to “the external co…

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The Vatican v. Protestant Free Thinkers

…re, then this was only because they were perceived to be Protestant-style “free thinkers.” The Roman Church, by contrast, was insistent on the importance of thinking traditionally and orthodox-ly, not just freely. This is a very different picture of Rome in the 1500s and 1600s, the same era saw that witnessed the first slow-moving gestures toward the creation of the Library, and then the Museums, at the Vatican. So, the Church in the 1500s cared m…

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Free Will, Fate and FiveThirtyEight: The Theology of Election Polls

…kind of freedom in order to have another. MHS: You mean that you trade the freedom to choose for the freedom of a world that feels unconstrained by predetermined trajectories? AL: Precisely. Which, bizarrely, means that free will is actually more constrained! MHS: Well, that’s kind of the ethic behind big data, right? That, at least in aggregate, decisions that feel like free choice actually follow very clear and pre-determined patterns, and these…

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In Hamline Case, the ‘Free Expression vs. Religious Sensibilities’ Frame Obscures a Stark Reality About Higher Education

…ention of people towards who said what and why and away from the issues of better pay, better work-life balance, pension, healthcare benefits and the like. And this is precisely what Hamline University has done by firing a vulnerable adjunct professor, a move that, if anything, further stokes divisiveness and Islamophobia in society. The message that Hamline has sent is that Muslims are an intolerant people who don’t value freedom of expression. A…

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Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?

…the only tool we have for evaluating beliefs about what transcends the empirical world. Caricatures can be useful in calling attention to things we might not otherwise notice. But caricatures cease to be useful when they’re confused with the real thing; when the critic invites his audience to deride the real thing based on the absurdity of the caricature. This is what Dawkins does in his little “note” to potential Free Inquiry subscribers. And it…

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