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Special Hell: Progressive Catholics Reckon With the Rise of Trump

…itically. One source of dismay for some Catholics is that so many of their number broke decisively toward Trump and were critical to his victory in the Rust Belt swing states. “The Catholic vote went for Trump and many Catholics joined the non-voting defectors. That’s a scandal that calls into question the moral standing and integrity of most—not all—Catholics today,” Marquette University moral theologian Dan Maguire told RD. To many, Catholic sup…

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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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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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An Unholy Holy Week: Is the All-Male Rule of the Roman Catholic Church Self-Destructing?

…in 20-40 years, we will have women priests ordained with the blessing of canon law (not outside canon law as at present). This will happen sooner than previously expected because each act of abuse or cover-up weakens the power of the male hierarchy. Their convoluted reasons for why only men can represent Jesus Christ at the altar are starting to ring hollow. “Call no man father,” warned Jesus in a passionate diatribe against “those who love the pl…

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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

…12: A Global Report on Discrimination Against Humanists, Atheists, and the Nonreligious,” which was released on December 10, Human Rights Day.  The IHEU report observes that while relatively few countries around the world criminalize irreligion as such, many impose arbitrary burdens on secular manifestations of conscience that are not experienced by others. These include laws and policies regulating: • apostasy and religious conversion; • blasphem…

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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

…generational ruptures that cast Christian-raised white Americans into the “None” category. Because rap never divested from its origins in the prophetic witness of the black church, it’s not surprising that rap and hip hop have been the home base for some of the most explicitly Christian content in music for some time. As is often the case, Kanye West was leaps and bounds ahead of his time when he released “Jesus Walks” on 2004’s The College Dropou…

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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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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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