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Evangelical “Sexual Purity” Is Not About Sex—It’s About Power

…nation in distress and claiming that evangelical Christianity can not only best explain the crisis, but save us from our demise. Is there anything you had to leave out? For a long time I considered writing an addendum about post-purity evangelicals. This is a concept introduced by Abigail Rine who wrote in The Atlantic about the growing number of evangelicals and former evangelicals who’ve been recounting their experiences with sexual purity. Many…

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RDBook: The End of the World As We Know It

…Cory Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”—probably the anthology’s best story—it’s a synchronistic series of unconnected acts of terrorism. The most original set-up is in Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” in which a virus wipes out the human race’s ability to use and comprehend language. Elsewhere the cause of the apocalypse is ambiguous—something best illustrated in Gene Wolfe’s “Mute,” in which two children watch news reports about a mys…

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Dinos and Demons and Swedes, Oh My! It May Be Cartoonish, but Evangelical Radicalism Isn’t Just a Sideshow

…voters who voted for Trump as a rough approximation—will assent to, or at best excuse, the claims. In authoritarian communities like the white evangelical one I grew up in, certain sacrosanct “Truths” become markers of in-group identity. Members of these communities build up infrastructure—in this case Christian publishing houses, bookstores, alternative cultural products, Christian schools and curricula, etc.—in order to generate pseudo-intellec…

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Dan Savage and Brian Brown Did It 

…ssive,” and says he overlooks the majority of biblical scholars. He’s also particularly peeved by Savage’s description of biblical perspectives of slavery: “If we want to have a debate let’s do it civilly,” he says. “Let’s look at the best scripture scholar. Sam Harris is not one of the best scripture scholars.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say someone who invites you into their home is lacking civility when they quote a writer you don’t like. Check…

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RD News Round-Up—September 22, 2008

…, the organization’s launch received blanket coverage from such likeminded sites as Conservative Grapevine, Catholic News Service, LifeSiteNews, LifeNews, Stop the ACLU, OneNewsNow and many more. The main donor to BornAliveTruth, a 527—an organization allowed to raise money from individuals in unlimited amounts—is Raymond Ruddy, who is described by Kuhnhein as “a prominent anti-abortion philanthropist in Massachusetts who supported Mitt Romney for

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Blame Muscular Christianity for Driscoll Fiasco

…failure. Hence, in order to steer things back in the right direction, the best course of action is one of rebuke and, ultimately, removal, which is the course taken by Acts 29 and now Mars Hill Church—just as his critics have wanted. There’s of course something to that line of thought, but it seems too easy. Specifically, it puts all the focus on Driscoll and ignores the culture that produced him in the first place. Partly through the shrewd use…

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Three Cheers for Mormon Support of Same-Sex Legislation? Not So Fast

…r their rights (to very little fanfare and often to dismissal or apathy at best), this provision bothers me deeply. In any case, RFMA is very much not the Equality Act, a bill that would provide sweeping non-discrimination protections for queer Americans that has languished in Congress for years. It’s a defensive piece of legislation, a protection of the status quo rather than a step forward. If America were truly a functional democracy, we could…

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AIG: On Charisma and Routinization of Greed

…t simplicity and broad comparative reach. The prophet, Weber suggested, is best defined as the unique bearer of charisma. No sooner had Weber offered his “unified theory” of the prophet than he subdivided the essential concept again, noting that there were two very different kinds of charisma with which he had to deal. On the one hand, there is the charisma of personality; on the other, there is the charisma of office. The two forms rarely, if eve…

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The Bible Is Not a Diet Plan

…“boring!” Or consider the words of another megapastor, Joel Osteen, in his bestselling Your Best Life Now: “If you are struggling financially, say something such as, ‘Father, I thank You that You’re causing me to be at the right place at the right time. You are bringing wonderful financial opportunities my way.’ If you will live with an attitude of faith, then, like the saints of old, before long God’s favor is going to show up, and that situation…

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Sam Harris and the New Islamophobes, Deconstructed

…ates, and the men who treat their wives and daughters like chattel—are the best examples of the doctrine in practice.” This is the same man who says, about Islam, “All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth.” Often his arguments seem to be poor attempts to plagiarize from the protocols of the elders of neo-conservatism. But even Bernard Lewis, one of the leading defenders of t…

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