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More Than Big Hair and Money: Jim, Tammy Faye and the Media “Holy Wars” of the 80s

…some of Jim and Tammy’s appeal. PTL was all about images so there were any number of options. Too bad books can’t come with a dozen different covers to choose from. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? I love the writing style of Lawrence Wright and Hampton Sides. They are both masters at weaving nonfiction into a page-turner. Anything half as good would be fine with me. What’s your next book? I’m not sure yet. Hopef…

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8: The Mormon Proposition Gets It Right

…have dismissed the film as blatantly false.   But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [See also Holly Welker’s review here. – Eds] Some take exception to editing choices that sequence events out of context for dramatic effect; others wish that the filmmakers had not been so cartoonish in their depictions of anti-gay-marriage standpoints, using only notori…

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Holy Father, You’re Not Helping: The Problem with the Pope’s Plan to Consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

…hief among them contention over the pope’s claim to universal authority. A number of violent incidents over two hundred years, from both sides of Christianity’s two halves, helped solidify the separation. These included the Byzantine massacre of Catholics living in Constantinople in 1182, the sacking of Thessaloniki by Catholics in 1185, and their pillage of Constantinople in 1204. Finally, the establishment of Rome-allied episcopacies in traditio…

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Glenn Beck’s Salvation Army

…faith through a prism of American nationalism? Not to mention the growing number of Americans without any religious commitment? Beck tells us, “you must fall to your knees and you must reconnect with God. He is not asking you. He is commanding us as a people to get behind Him. He will right the wrongs. We will have to pay a price because we lived outside of His laws. We will have to pay a price, but every day we don’t get behind Him, the price ge…

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Orthodox Jews Begin to Reckon with Sexual Abuse

…ss prevalent in the Orthodox community than anywhere else; but there are a number of peculiarities to Orthodox Jewish life that have made the reporting of abuse less common than in society at large. “I think the subject of abuse is probably the same in any religious community,” says Michael Salomon, a Long Island psychiatrist, who has just finished working on an as-yet-unpublished book about sexual abuse in the Orthodox world. “Different religions…

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New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

…o “blasphemous content.” The IHEU reports being contacted by an increasing number of secularist groups organizing on Facebook, including groups in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Sudan. In all of this, the United States is an anomaly since it rejects even laws against religious hate speech, which were found in 36 of 45 European states in 2011. It’s the best place in the wo…

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My Business, Myself: Piercing the Corporate Veil

…oyees are required by the new law to provide insurance.) However, if Annex chooses to offer its employees insurance, its plan—like those of larger companies—must comply with the minimum requirements for preventive health care services, including contraceptive services. In keeping with emphasis of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on “wellness,” the law requires most insurance plans to cover preventive health care services without co-pays. Government r…

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Dear White Evangelicals: A Black Square Ain’t Gonna Cut It

…doubt that a start would have been not being able to count on one hand the number of Black children in my entire Christian school student-body. Do Black educators only exist in public schools? Of course not. Why then couldn’t we find more Black scholars to employ when it came to teaching children? I can tell you that I’ll recognize change as genuine when white preachers and ministers stop using Bible verses to pacify their white congregants by amp…

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Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

…r prayers. But these ultra-devout performers share a peculiar space with a number of other artists whose personal faiths are inconsequential to their public personae but whose fluency in the holy plays out in, well, mysterious ways. Lana Del Rey’s catalogue runs deep with both religious imagery and sentiment; waves of apostasy crash over moments of divine revelation and then reverse course back into faith again. She may have claimed “God’s dead…[a…

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Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

…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 scandal, which had Boston at its epicenter. That’s a pretty low bar, but of course n…

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