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The Sacred and the Dead: Three Ways to American Beauty

…Candyman’s in town” This is the grateful seduction, sometimes for good, many times for ill, but real any way you slice it. Two more times for the Dead to, in the words of bassist Phil Lesh, “suck the last dance right out of you…” How much are those tickets to the very last gigs at Soldier Field this weekend going for? For real? You got to be kidding me! I could feed a family for a month for that price. But one can’t put a price on American Beauty…

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“Tell Me What You Believe About Ferguson, and I’ll Tell You What You Believe About God”: A Missouri Pilgrimage

…akes the bus because he got tired of the random stops and numerous traffic tickets he would get each month due to racial profiling. At 30 years old, he says he has been stopped or arrested for unjust cause more than 150 times. “If you’re a person of color in Missouri, it’s just part of the normal experience. You go five miles over the speed limit, you sit in jail for two weeks.” Masri, whose family is Palestinian and who spent some time living in…

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For the Love of God, Bono, Please Stop Touring

…ly black, a stadium full of white people who paid more than a Benjamin for tickets is not going to be the nexus for authentic justice conversations. I work for a white, affluent, suburban, mega-church, so I’m used to that. But at that moment, before the music even started, I knew what my friend was referencing—I was about to get spiritual too. “They knew they were born to weep and keep the morticians employed as long as they pledge allegiance to t…

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“Paleo” is More Than a Fad Diet: Boyd Eaton’s Plan to Return to Eden

…llion living an okay life? Well, that’s the greatest good for the greatest number—the argument that you’re making. If you want a livable lifestyle for the greatest number, then living at a minimal level with 12 billion people would be better. If you want people living the very best possible lifestyle, then 100 million people would be better. If you stop thinking about only human beings, but thinking about all the rest of the living organisms on ea…

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Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

…s I watched talented African American actors hamming up “African-ness” for cheap laughs. It brought to mind the long, shameful history of Americans—black and white—performing blackness (often in blackface) on stage for white audiences. The Book of Mormon wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of The Lion King and its African stereotypes by substituting more authentic stereotypes. It wants to be transgressive and conventional, blasphemous…

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End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

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The Burning Houses of Worship We Missed

…g District of Western China, where officials have reportedly bulldozed over 800 mosques. Authorities have also detained hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in re-education camps. The scale of the suffering is difficult to imagine. In fairness, there’s been a lot of good reporting about the plight of the Uighurs. And yet I believe the outpouring of emotion for more recognizable places—especially Notre Dame—is instructive. Samuel Johnson defined sympat…

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What Coverage of a Fatal Orthodox Baptism Reveals About Western Media

…mportant marker of Eastern Christian identity—particularly as increasingly numbers of Eastern Christians became the simultaneous targets of Western crusaders and Islamic conquerors. In this context, rigid adherence to liturgical customs became a means by which to assert and preserve identity in the face of colonization and oppression. Conversely, adherence to Christian practices abandoned by the Christian West—if not in the Middle Ages then certai…

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Rep. Cleaver’s ‘Awoman’ Prayer Enrages Christian Nationalists Who Taste Their Own Medicine and Still Miss the Point

…fetish of their choosing. But they should not do so with a government microphone, and not on the taxpayers’ time and dime. We’ve seen plenty of divisive prayers from the conservative side. Often deliberately so, wielding prayer like a cudgel. The Pennsylvania legislator’s Jesus-laden, jaw-dropping prayer uttered to intimidate the state’s first female Muslim legislator. A preacher echoed this prayer, telling the Virginia House of Delegates that “ev…

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