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Everything You Think You Know About the Dark Ages is Wrong

By Nancy Marie Brown

…gs on a pillar in the right aisle. Pope Sergius IV, who had been Gerbert’s papal librarian, wrote his epitaph. It reads, in part: “The emperor, Otto III, to whom he was always faithful and devoted, loved him greatly and offered him this church of Rome. They illuminated their time, emperor and pope, by the brilliance of their wisdom. The century rejoiced.” Upon Gerbert’s death, Sergius said, “the world was darkened and peace disappeared.” How prop…

Huckabee Channels Rushdoony

By Julie Ingersoll

…rd, to re-write American history without God. For Rushdoony, Barton, and apparently Huckabee, history is not the academic discipline most of us have in mind when we use the term: the effort to assemble evidence from the past to understand events, their context, and change over time. In fact, Jon Stewart nailed it when he argued that Barton “doesn’t seem like a historian, he seems seem almost like a theologian whose thrust is ‘I want this country t…

Orthodox TV Channel Offers Gays One-Way Ticket Out of Russia; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…mob attack on an anti-homophobia rally in 2013. Germany: Marriage equality passes parliament; Merkel allowed conscience vote but voted no Chancellor Angela Merkel, a longtime opponent of legal marriage for same-sex couples, decided to allow a parliamentary vote and the German parliament passed a marriage equality law. While polls show that an overwhelming majority of Germans support marriage equality, Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union “has alway…

New Film Chronicles Unlikely Friendship in Battle Over God and Guns

By Sarah Posner

…reak in need of a public health response—but a spiritual disease requiring a spiritual response. “It falls to the leadership of the community as much as the membership, but especially the leadership,” he said. “That is, pastors in the pulpit dealing with this question and demonstrating how it contradicts the Christian life and message.” The Armor of Light opens in theaters in 20 cities on Friday. Tickets are free for NRA members….

“Tell Me What You Believe About Ferguson, and I’ll Tell You What You Believe About God”: A Missouri Pilgrimage

By Anita Little

…ards adorned the block of darker asphalt that didn’t match the rest of the pavement. This is because the original 160 square-feet patch, permanently stained by Brown’s blood, was removed and repaved roughly two years ago at the request of his family. They didn’t want people casually driving over the site of their son’s crucifixion. Sacred ground Earlier in the day, our group had stopped at the Cahokia Mounds. The most complex archaeological site n…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…ust about a million. There were of course retaliatory Chechen attacks, but paling in comparison. The Russian and Soviet expansion into the Caucasus eliminated whole peoples. There are, for example, no Ubykh speakers anymore. Most Circassians live in Turkey, Syria, Jordan, or anywhere but Cherkessia, which is their homeland. In a history of the past two centuries, one cannot worry much about the Muslim failure to ‘catch up to’ or copycat Western sc…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…d the annual Miracle of Mormon Pageant in Manti, Utah, or the Hill Cumorah Pageant in Palmyra, New York. On a more professional level, the LDS Church’s film division (originally operated out of BYU) has produced hundreds of schmaltzy movies over the years. There is a distinctive heavy-handed theatricality about contemporary Mormon productions, a sensibility not too far from Rogers & Hammerstein. In many ways, including cuisine, Utah is a time caps…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

The Burning Houses of Worship We Missed

By Gordon Haber

…ble places—especially Notre Dame—is instructive. Samuel Johnson defined sympathy—or what we might now call “empathy”—as an “act of the imagination.” To put it less elegantly, when trying to understand the pain of others, we need to imagine ourselves in their shoes. And it’s simply human nature for us to be more touched by the familiar. I don’t have any simple answers. But I can say that unless we fight against that impulse, we’re consigning the we…