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Everything You Think You Know About the Dark Ages is Wrong

…arvelous side effect of writing a book like this one that is outside my comfort zone of knowledge was that I had to ask for help. I found it in Barcelona, Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, Monistrol-sur-Loire, London, Fribourg, Bobbio, New Haven, and Rome, where I was fortunate to spend time with several of the modern scholars who are bringing Gerbert’s life and accomplishments to light. I am very grateful for their generosity in teaching me what I needed…

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What Will Orthodox ‘Republicanity’ Look Like?

…that Democrats need to get better at telling stories than at crunching the numbers, in this battle of the budget, the numbers actually matter. Hell, it’s a fight about numbers. And balance. And the virtue of justice. What this latest budget battle, and the question of raising the debt ceiling, and the straw polls are revealing, is just how Tertullian a wing of the Republican Party has become. It not only offers absurd arguments with a straight fac…

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Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

…ept an ‘abstracted’ science? And what does abstract science do for us? The number of nuclear bombs used by the West outweighs the number used by the entire planet. Muslims did not invent nuclear weapons, nor have they used them. (Let’s pray that stands.) When Saddam Hussein was our ally, he unleashed chemical weapons on Kurds at Halabja, the only confirmed instance of a Muslim regime using chemical weapons. Even considering the possibility of Assa…

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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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Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…

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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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Fox Makes Mockery Of Promise To Rein In Beck’s Anti-Semitism

…rship of Fox News made a mockery of their professed understanding. In an effort to demonize a political opponent, Beck and Fox News scurrilously attacked George Soros, a prominent Jewish philanthropist and Holocaust survivor. No one who truly understands “the sensitivity and sacred nature” of the Holocaust would deliberately and grotesquely mischaracterize the experience of a 13 year old Jew in Nazi-occupied Hungary whose father hid him with a non…

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New Poll: Repeal DOMA

…s, but the numbers [pdf] show that the sample actually skewed right. Of the 800 registered voters polled 38 percent were strong, weak, or independent-leaning Democrats with 41 percent identifying as strong, weak, or independent leaning Republicans. Conservatives outweighed liberals by 38 to 18 percent, and a full 74 percent of those polled identified as religious. Some 40 percent claimed the moniker of “born again,” and 33 percent said they attend…

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What To Do When Fred Phelps Arrives in Your Neighborhood

…in overt ways. Cohocton is a small town, with a population in 2009 of about 800 people. It is in upstate New York. It is not my small town, nor is it likely yours; and yet each of these places is someone’s neighborhood. This time, it is only an hour away for me.    Picketing as “The Workingman’s Means of Communication” On March 2, 2011, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in response to a series of prior decisions around Westboro Baptist Church’s pi…

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Lifestyles of the Rich and Pious

CNN’s Belief Blog has a great rundown of the lavish homes of American archbishops who haven’t gotten the memo from Pope Francis about a “church which is poor and for the poor.” CNN reports that “10 of the 34 active archbishops in the United States live in buildings worth more than $1 million.” The median home value in the U.S. is $174,200. Not surprisingly, that list includes some of the nation’s most outspoken conservative bishops—and allies of…

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