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Conservative Christians Insist the Toxic Theology Portrayed in the Duggar Family Doc is ‘Fringe’ — But is it Really All That Different?

By Caroline Matas

…exas governor Rick Perry, former mayor of Indianapolis and deputy mayor of New York City Stephen Goldsmith, and current U.S. Representative Daniel Webster (R-FL). Past members of the IBLP’s Board of Directors and Advisory Board include billionaire and part-owner of the San Antonio Spurs James Leininger, former Congressman Sam Johnson (R-TX), and Georgia State Senator Ralph T. Hudgens. Gothard’s foundational beliefs—the eponymous “basic life princi…

Are You There God? It’s Us, Googling

By Michael Schulson

…en, economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz crunches Google search data for the New York Times and comes up with some fun statistics about, say, the anxieties of pregnant women (“can pregnant women eat shrimp?” is a popular search query in the US) or the ratio of heart-related to penis-related searches (67:100 for those keeping score). This Sunday, Stephens-Davidowitz turned his attention to God. Some of the patterns he documents are predictable, such…

Fusion Politics: A Way Forward for Bernie Sanders?

By Daniel Schultz

…to think Sanders and his movement will be strongly influential. There are any number of priorities Sanders could choose from, of course. God knows it’s not like our nation isn’t in need of reform. At the moment, though, I’m less concerned with the pros and cons of any one issue than wondering what things might look like if Bernie tapped into what Rev. William Barber has named “fusion politics.” In the Christian Century, Jeremy Borden describes thi…

Life Imitates Satire Imitates Life: Rep. King Revives Manchurian Candidate

By The Editors

…didate a Joseph McCarthy stand-in uses his own investigative tool to determine how many crypto-commies there really are… Rep. Peter King (R-NY), minus 45 years from Religion Dispatches on Vimeo….

Commies, Blacks, Jews, the UCC and Other Threats to America

By Daniel Schultz

…aid of the religious left. It means we’re doing our job. And just in case anyone missed the number of religious progressive groups endorsing the rally, here’s a list culled from One Nation site. Their list of endorsers is pretty long, so I apologize if I missed somebody: Rainbow PUSH Coalition The Shalom Center Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations Sikh Coalition The Religious Institute The Community Church of NY Unitarian Universali…

We Were Here Before September 11th

By Amina Wadud

…w when he was a toddler), is opening up in Chicago. It opened last week in New York to grave reviews and a few awards. If you are near by I hope you check it out: “Mooz-lum”, the movie. It is not the story of every African-American Muslim but it is a story about African-American Islam, in one of its many reflections. We are here. We were here before September 11, 2001. Since we survived the peculiar institution of race-based slavery in America, de…

Glenn Beck’s Salvation Army

By Peter Montgomery

…of the Christianity of Acts 2 and the earliest years of Christianity. Ask any Amish person. To Beck and Barton, the question of President Obama’s beliefs about salvation is not only a theological dividing line between good and evil, but also legitimate political fodder because they say it is a source of his collectivist, even Marxist, worldview. And it demonstrates his lack of commitment to the “quintessential American concept” of individual right…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…hollow with the daily revelations of sexual abuse cases—most recently the New York Times’ exposé on the deaf children abused by Father Murphy in Wisconsin. The exponential spread of documents and stories surrounding clerical sexual abuse, from Wisconsin to Munich, has put the Vatican in a defensive posture against the media, circling the flaming wagons around its impervious leader. Making matters worse, the Pope tried to deflect from the mounting…

No Conspiracy Theories Needed: Abortion Foes Cry Racism

By Kathryn Joyce

…ans by claiming to fight “individuals and organizations that have as their mission to eliminate blacks from America”; and veteran activists have issued dozens of press releases demanding that Obama fight racism by fighting abortion. Proponents of the argument certainly see it, and the moment, as a key opportunity for the cause. In response to Rep. Frank’s September bill, one longstanding anti-abortion and anti-contraception group, the Population R…

Response to Daniel Philpott: the Politics of Religious Freedom

By Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

…to unsettle in significant ways the assumption that is so ubiquitous in many academic and policy circles—and that is reflected in Dan’s response to my RD essay—that religious freedom is a singular achievement, an easily understood state of affairs, and that the problem lies in its incomplete realization. Our collaborative project has sought to understand the different conceptions of religious freedom at play in the world today, their different so…