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Protesters in Washington DC, the day before the January 6 insurrection, wrapped in American flags blow shofars.

Netanyahu’s Genocidal Religious Rhetoric isn’t Just an Appeal to the Israeli Right — He Has Another Constituency in Mind

…e Israelites came into their Promised Land . . . God had to move in mighty ways to remove their enemies. . . . Our Promised Land is Pennsylvania and we’re taking it back.” Which brings us back to Israel/Palestine. Netanyahu and American Christian nationalists not only invoke similar religious rhetoric in their desire to expand their “Promised Land,” but they also start with a parallel us vs. them religiously-coded binary that envisions Native Amer…

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The Faith Outreach Canard

…Eleison Group, who the RNS article notes worked doing faith outreach on a number of Democratic campaigns in 2006 and 2008 but not in 2010. In both the RNS interview and in an article on Huffington Post, Sapp argues for a causal link between lackluster faith outreach in this election cycle and Democratic losses; his conclusion: “the results were disastrous.” To support this argument, Sapp claims the following: Compared to ’06, Democrats nationally…

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The Devil is in the Details

…ash for travel with the knowledge that using ATMs abroad is always a great way to get the best rates. Yep that’s right. The U.S. always considers its own currency to have slightly greater value than the local money changers and banks. They consider their own currency to have the greater value. So I lived in Indonesia for a year and a half without ever getting a local bank account. At this point the ubiquitous ATM is one way to access your own reso…

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What Pence and Kaine Reveal About Divides in Catholicism

…olicism that freed up Catholics to affiliate with whatever political party best met their priorities: social justice issues for left-leaning Catholics and sexual restraint, law-and-order, and a muscular national defense for right-leaning Catholics. And, as Jack Jenkins notes at Think Progress: …if this sort of dissenting spirit was unique among modern American Catholics, one could plausibly argue that the United States has created an environment t…

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Do Space Aliens Need Baptism? The View From Gliese 581g

…stly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” What’s more, whether or not it reflects reality, there is an unavoidable psychological tendency to associate the small with the insignificant. This may be seen in the history of astronomy, which is a history of receding horizons. Scientists have often balked (and not always for scientific reasons) at man…

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

…nal Urban League, the National Baptist Convention, People for the American Way and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. My first reaction to this was to wonder why the Times is acting as Glenn Beck’s hatchet man. About the only thing these groups have in common is that they endorsed this rally. What, exactly, is the point of listing them all together? To make clear who Beck doesn’t like? To convince readers that the UCC, black Baptists and oth…

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Halloween, Evangelicals, and the Macabre

…itique of all things macabre and “occultic.” American evangelicalism has always had a strong sense of evil which it battles in various manifestations—frequently in the form of popular culture. This sense of the presence of and confrontation with evil, however, ramps up during the Halloween season whether the focus is the holiday itself or those minority religions associated with it. In regards to the season itself, most evangelical churches will o…

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We Were Here Before September 11th

…ca for a select Brown Muslim population. Still African-American Muslims outnumber them, and face double invisibility and erasure: from within and from without. So, if you ever wonder why I don’t comment on some of the “top” stories in the news about Islam in America, I intentionally try not to respond to sensationalism. I don’t comment about a story if the story already gets enough media attention and if the story does not help script the dynamics…

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The American Media’s Longterm Ambivalence About the Papacy

…mage forecasts that Life’s Catholic coverage would differ from Time’s in a number of ways. First and most obviously, it depicts a woman; second and perhaps less so, it depicts work. The lives of Catholics, the picture says, do not require the stillness or the clerical luxury depicted in many of Time’s cover images of prelates and popes. Life’s cover images of lived-religion would continue with the then-famous Dionne sisters (the first known quintu…

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Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

…aniel Burke at CNN.com in a lengthy, mostly anecdotal piece, “there’s more way than one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or who feels less horrible about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse…

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