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Obama Admin Rules Religious Institutions Must Comply with Contraception Mandate

…ng equality to LGBT people, as infringements of religious liberty, will be central to the religious right agenda in 2012.  UPDATE: The Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, which, as I reported in my long religious freedom piece, represents both a Catholic college and an evangelical university in challenging the rule, has issued a statement (tellingly calling the rule an “abortion drug mandate”) claiming that the rule will not withstand constitution…

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GOP, Gingrich, Perry Team Up to put Satirists Out of Work

…under of the American Family Association, says, “The homosexual movement’s promotion of same-sex marriage undermines the God-ordained institution of marriage and family which is the foundation of all societies.” And Beverly LaHaye, the founder of Concerned Women for America who also endorsed Gingrich, once said, “Politicians who do not use the Bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office.” Well, that settles it, doesn’t it…

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LDS Church Calls on Members to back Minnesota Anti-Equality Initiative

…s who can get married in the [LDS] temple. I asked her about the religious freedom of my LGBT friends who attend churches that would happily marry them. Where was their religious freedom?… She conceded she hadn’t thought about these things… The LDS Church has an army of volunteers at its beck and call. Imagine the good it could do if rallied for health care for all or lowering education costs or clean air initiatives.” Affirmation, the world’s old…

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God or Gay, No Need to Choose Sides

…ness—and only in those contexts. 2. That whatever the prohibition is, it’s central to religion. It isn’t. The “sin” in Leviticus is the same as eating a shrimp cocktail. Jesus never mentions homosexuality at all. It’s not in the ten commandments. It’s marginal, and of marginal concern. 3. That the “sin of Sodom” is homosexuality. It isn’t. It’s greed, cruelty, and inhospitality (Ezekiel 16:49-50, Jeremiah 23:14, Amos 4:1-2). Who is your audience?…

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The New York Times Sunday Review has a Mormon Problem

…nyone? The LDS Church’s regrettable denial of the lay priesthood to men of African descent is a matter of historical record. (For a detailed discussion of the ban, its origins, and its termination, please read here and here.)  But Siegels’ characterization of Mormonism as a “white God’s” plan “for whites” would come as news to millions of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Asia, Latin America, and Africa who have claimed…

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Greek Abbot Arrested for Role in Financial Scandal

…s-savvy monks had traded some relatively worthless land by a lake in north-central Greece; land that had been ceded to them by a Byzantine emperor centuries before for extensive real estate holdings in Athens, costing the Greek government (and the taxpayers) an estimated $130 million or more. It was unclear how the thing had been arranged, but the scandal led to the defeat of the ruling conservative coalition of the New Democracy in late 2009. Thi…

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Dieting, Sex, Jesus: The Body as Moral Battleground

…’s the most important take-home message for readers? That religion is both central to and often invisible in many Western bodily projects. It shapes the moral norms and values which fuel projects of bodily change and its practices provide disciplines that are believed to effect change. And, as in many other areas of life and culture, religious hopes and physical realities are often in a complicated dance. Or, in the words of historian Hillel Schwa…

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Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

…ok-length project as I proceeded. I had to keep reminding myself about the central questions that were driving this project. For a while, I even had an index card taped on my wall with what I understood as the book’s thesis written on it. Whenever I felt lost, I would look up and remind myself what the book was about. I wasn’t writing a study of Francis Bacon’s work; I wasn’t writing a history of the Hollywood action genre; I wasn’t writing a cont…

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Occupy Francis Lewis Boulevard

…City, Jewish and Uzbek. I get my trim while listening to Russian-speaking Central Asians scream into their cell phones, all of which are so much cooler than mine; this particular virtual argument was about an order for an organic something that didn’t go through. I guess. Then halfway through my haircut, a South Asian man walks into the barbershop and sits two chairs down from me. He’s wearing a dark brown shalwar qameez, the clothes most commonl…

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The British (Bible) Invasion: KJV 400-Year Anniversary Rolls On

…science” were not yet anxious and antipathetic competitors. The spirit of republican individualism unleashed revolutionary forces that would lead to the execution of a king, an atrociously violent civil war, the Cromwellian protectorate, a restored monarchy and the eventual institution of a Bill of Rights of sorts under the aegis of a “Glorious Revolution” in 1688. On the far side of the Atlantic, these same forces, grounded in the rejection of t…

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