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Behind the Inclusive-Sounding Ads of this $100 Million PR-Blitz-for-Jesus it’s the Same Old Conservative Christian Fantasy

By Chrissy Stroop

…o reel in the youth before they’re fully aware of what they’re getting into. At the end of the day, “He Gets Us” amounts to both an egregious misuse of $100 million (an amount that could do so much to, for example, alleviate the pervasive problems of homelessness or unaffordable medical care in the United States) and a predatory type of manipulation. Thankfully, the manipulation, at least, is obvious so we can take some comfort in how easy it is t…

Thoreau’s Ferocious Critique of Philanthropy Does Not Make Him “Selfish”

By Alda Balthrop-Lewis

…panies have always sought cheaper labor, moving from North to South in the United States, looking for the hungriest, the most desperate, the least organized, the most exploitable. Press coverage of conditions in Apple’s factories in China has been anything but glowing. Yet when Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, says he’ll give his personal wealth to charities of his choice (many of them in Silicon Valley), he gets praise and Apple gets good press. Never min…

Air Kissing the Mezuzah: Religion and Science Collide in Fight Against Virus

By Shalom Goldman

…seven million people. (According to the World Health Organization more than 800 people around the world have died from this flu.) Flying over Israel and taking one’s prayers a little closer to the heavens might seem like a recent rabbinic innovation, but it is not. Actually, there were a number of precedents for such prayer flights; one as early as 1942, when the Jews of British Mandatory Palestine feared that the Nazis would break through the Bri…

Orthodox Rabbi Imitates Pat Robertson

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…d lesbians – and the alleged acceptance they are currently enjoying in the United States – as the cause of natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. We have seen the underground earthquake, tsunami, Katrina, and now Haiti. All this is in sync with a two thousand year old teaching in the Talmud that the practice of homosexuality is a spiritual cause of earthquakes. Once a disaster is unleashed, innocents are also victims just like in Ch…

What Coverage of a Fatal Orthodox Baptism Reveals About Western Media

By Katherine Kelaidis

Last week a six-week-old baby died in Suceava, Romania during his baptism into the Romanian Orthodox Church. The priest is being held on manslaughter charges and a firestorm of anger has begun to be directed at the Orthodox Church’s practice of full-immersion infant baptism, including a petition urging the Romanian church to change its practice. The Romanian Patriarch has said no such changes will occur. But neither the incident (no matter how tr…

Boy Scout “Perversion Files” Raise Questions about Abuse in Mormon Contexts

By Joanna Brooks

…the Church has partnered with the BSA, hosting scout troops in most of its United States congregations. (The New York Times profiled the LDS-BSA relationship—including the experience of gay LDS Boy Scouts impacted by BSA’s LGBT discrimination policies—this week.) Today, a whopping 34% of Boy Scouts troops nationwide are co-sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But sources who have scrutinized the BSA’s so-called “perversi…

“Stress Test” a Con: Obama Still Coddling Banks

By Peter Laarman

…taphor, forgetting that the so-called patient being “tested” is actually an 800-pound gorilla that needs to be put into a cage if not shot dead outright. Johnson pointed out this morning that today’s news non-event even has a kind of Goldilocks character that the big media are bound to lap right up. It will turn out that the $1 trillion in TARP is an amount “just right” to cover the self-declared capital needs of the big banks. Bernanke said this…

Racist Remarks by popular BYU Religion Professor Spark Controversy

By Joanna Brooks

…missionaries, to as many as 3,000 students a year. This semester, more than 800 students are registered in Professor Bott’s classes. (Eleven are registered for BYU’s African-American history course this semester.) Professors at BYU routinely find themselves having to address racist and sexist content taught in Bott’s classes, and many are outraged and embarrassed by his rogue remarks to the Washington Post, say sources at the university. “Dr. Bott…

Why Crux‘s Knights of Columbus “Partnership” is Problematic

By Kaya Oakes

…mpaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. In 2005, they printed 800,000 postcards in Canada “in a campaign that [argued] that the redefinition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would promote pedophilia, pornography and unsafe sex.” As Marianne Duddy-Burke of the LGBTQ Catholic organization Dignity USA commented in a press release, “The Knights are deeply invested in advancing a particular brand of Catholicism, and I am con…

A Muslim Reflects on Christian Theologian (and UCLA Coach) John Wooden

By Amir Hussain

I wept on Friday evening when I heard the news of the death of Coach John Wooden. I had seen him the day before at UCLA looking frail and tired after 99 good years—as long and rewarding a life as one could hope. Coach Wooden was ready for a good death, surrounded by family and friends, knowing that he would soon meet his beloved Nellie again, who had passed on some 25 years earlier. But the tears in my eyes were not for Coach; in losing him, we l…