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Global LGBT Recap: Asylum for Victims of Homophobia Exports; Orthodox Church Sees Anti-Gay Campaign Turned Toward Itself

By Peter Montgomery

…eiled in a ceremony on Friday, January 10 in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, reports the Jerusalem Post (h/t Bilerico’s John Becker). The new monument will be mounted outside the Municipal LGBT Community Center in Meir Park (Gan Meir) which serves as the city’s main hub of activity for the LGBT community. The monument will be shaped in the form of a pink triangle, reminiscent of the pink triangles LGBT community members were required to attach to their clothes in…

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ISIS is the Islamic “Reformation”

By Ed Simon

…mon parlance has us believe that that the Middle Ages were a particularly brutal period). From the French wars of religion, to the English civil wars, to the Thirty Years’ War (where possibly 30% of German civilians perished) the arrival of modernity signaled terror and horror in many corners. How we use words like “medieval,” “reformation,” and “modern” must be exact if we’re to make any sense out of what the Islamic State is, and how we are to d…

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Thinking Clearly about Anti-Mormon Prejudice

By Joanna Brooks

…n a Texas college town writes that one mother at the neighborhood pool instructed her children not to play with his Mormon kids. Another woman in Texas remembers that her LDS congregation was banned from participating in a community-wide Christmas event and that non-Church members once barged into Sunday meetings shouting that Mormons were cult members and devil worshippers. A man who grew up in upstate New York remembers being singled out as Morm…

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Passover with Mohammed: A Jewish Journalist in Yemen

By Sam Kestenbaum

…eak from the cramped newsroom where we work for lunch. I’m an editor at an English newspaper in Sana’a and he’s a translator. Khalid is a wiry, gentle man who owns one suit that he wears every day. There have been reports (still unverified) of clashes with Al-Qaeda in the south, a story about drone strike in Marib, just two hours to the east, is also emerging. But lunch is a very important time in Yemen. Three other reporters join us and we order…

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Philadelphia Man Blames Bible for Stoning Death

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ayers was to put an end to the victim’s life. John Thomas stated that he struck the victim approximately 10 times in the head. After the final blow, John Thomas made sure the victim was dead.” But the full story reveals that Thomas’ “the Bible made me do it” excuse may just be that. Thomas had another, far older, motive for the killing: money. He was the sole heir to Seidman’s estate. Yet Thomas’ excuse that the Bible supposedly sanctioned his hor…

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Pigging Out: What ‘Radically Unkosher’ Jewish Foodies Like Michael Pollan Are Missing

By Jonathan Schorsch

…of it to the poor (the rest went to the levites when the temple stood in Jerusalem); remove a small portion of any bread dough to be burned up as a kind of home sacrificial offering; reserve special meals or feasts for special occasions, i.e., sabbath and festivals. Hasidic masters recommended that you stop eating before you are full, just as Pollan learned from other cultures. In recent decades Western Jews have even been generating their own ver…

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Conservative Catholics Try to Domesticate Laudato Si

By Patricia Miller

…. “The bishops are manufacturing their own truth so they can sell it to the political establishment,” he said. The bigger question in the long run is whose truth will win out: the pope’s or the bishops’?…

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We May Be Sacrificing Our Children to the God of the Gun — But it’s Not That the God Requires the Deaths

By Stephanie Frank

…nt picture emerges. Biden appeals to the name of God because his Bible instructs that the name of the Biblical God is profaned when adults sacrifice children. By the logic of Hubert and Mauss, Americans’ ongoing willingness to see children slaughtered constructs a twisted and perverse god—what the writers of the Hebrew Bible would consider a false god, an idol. By persisting in their claims, absolute gun-rights defenders are elevating the god sust…

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Rites, Rituals, and the King

By Amina Wadud

…e is one of surrender. We are also khalifah, or agent, representative and trustee. This is our relationship to Allah’s Jamal attributes or her rubbubiyyah. In this, our proper posture is active engagement in all aspects of life. This engagement should manifest our inner states of surrender (this is for all our actions, not just in worship or ibadah, but also in our mu’amalat). There’s a Sufi image of these two postures, like a ball, the top half f…

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Mourning Jenni Rivera: “When a Lady Dies”

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…omen during the conquest and even today. We remember Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, an intellectual foremother who struggled to find a voice in a Church that silenced her intellectual pursuits. We remember Frida Kahlo, whose pain was passionately expressed through her artwork. Yet while we must tell these women’s stories in light of the tragic, we must also celebrate their accomplishments; the manner in which they challenged and triumphed over the pow…

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