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God’s Obituary: A Humanist Response to Mass Murder

…extreme human tragedy makes it impossible to talk about God in any useful way. Don’t read this statement as a selfish demand for comfort, for an easy life. No, it’s recognition that nothing explains away the destruction of life’s integrity; but instead it highlights the fact that we labor in this world without cosmic aid that can protect us from us. Appeals to free will (as my comments are bound to generate) might not be a limitation God imposes…

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The Audacity of Melancholy: Race, Tragedy, and the Anguish of Progress

…elf-Making in Nineteenth Century America. The book is brilliant in so many ways, but I especially appreciate the way that Hartman interrupts progressive narratives, or linear slavery-to-freedom accounts of black American history. Her description of how the end of slavery hurled black bodies into new configurations of power and regulation performs a critique of progress and facile notions of freedom that I can only imitate. In addition, the way she…

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Despite Vastly Different Values, Evangelical ‘Hamilton’ Connects Secular Left and Christian Right

…r point was that art may not survive democracy. Borders are necessary. Our best art and our best ideas ought to be kept out of reach if they’re to do any real work in the world. As it goes with art, so it is with religion. Give your beliefs a tough shell or skin and the uninvested (some say undeserving) will pass it by. Thick skin protects what’s inside by sometimes repulsing even those willing to give it a try. Thin-skinned ideas on the other han…

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Does Mormonism Encourage LDS People to Lie?

…t’s nothing shocking that an American minority group might develop its own way of talking to outsiders. But in some Mormon circles one does hear bitter accusations of “lying for the Lord,” and sometimes one does witness among Mormon people today the remnants of a deep-seated sense that telling a complete, straightforward story is not always good for LDS interests. The most penetrating assessment of this Mormon cultural phenomenon comes from lingui…

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How New Religions Are Made

…mall, some might say, “marginal” religious groups are connected in so many ways to so many other groups, crossing lines of space, race, and time. It led me to rethink the utility of the “marginal” and to discover just how rich those religions are as a way of understanding the world and much larger movements, religious, cultural, political, and otherwise. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? Well, obviously, this is my first book…

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History in the Making: Religion, Race and Gender in the Presidential Election

…aries in Mississippi. Thus, it is an understatement to say that race has always been a factor in presidential elections. Then and now, religion has always functioned in support of both sides of the racial conflict. Although the first amendment prohibited the establishment of religion while permitting its free exercise, Americans continue to disagree about the appropriate role of religion in the public domain. Those who think that religion has an a…

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Mitt Romney, Frontrunner: Deal With It

…s). He even managed to joke about Sarah Palin’s bus tour antics being “the best thing that could happen” to his candidacy. Right now, Mitt Romney’s greatest problem appears to be Republican Party itself. After opportunistically handing the reins to Tea Partiers and evangelical conservatives to capitalize on unbridled rage against the nation’s first African-American president, the GOP has now cultivated a base most interested in crusading against s…

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CPAC 2017: Hypocrites on Parade

…s in America because of sanctuary cities. This incendiary statement is, at best, unproven. At worst, it is a willful distortion of the best research and data available. Crime rates among undocumented immigrants are notoriously difficult to track accurately, in part for the reason Clarke recognized. But the allegation that sanctuary cities are “havens” for violence is patently false. There is simply no evidence to suggest that cities that decline t…

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Will Trump’s Weakness Threaten White Evangelical Support?

…. At first glance, evangelical support for Trump appeared transactional at best, hypocritical at worst. In fact, evangelical support for Trump was consistent with a longstanding preference for militant masculine leadership. Militant white masculinity has always been at the center of family-values evangelicalism. In the 1960s and 1970s, evangelicals insisted that strong, patriarchal authority would defend families against the incursions of feminism…

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(Ex-)Ex-Gay Activist Alan Chambers On His Prop 8 Epiphany and the Downfall of Christianity and Evangelicalism

them, that they are sinful or disordered. What’s your advice to them? The best thing we can teach people is what we know about God. The truth is, God is full of grace. The truth is God is good. The truth is, he is not angry. The truth is, you have the freedom to be who you want to be because he created you with that freedom. He created you with the freedom to choose who you are going to become and the life that you are going to live. Our responsi…

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