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Into the Darkest Moment of a Dark Year Comes the Saturnalia, a Time for Drinking, Swearing, Gambling, and the Circle of Life

…god belonging to an era before civilization constrained men with societal codes and rigidities. During the Saturnalia, they break free of restrictions, provided that order (Cosmos) be restored at the end of the festival. There’s nothing more appropriate to reflect on in a pandemic year of grief which has forced us to reconsider fragility, finitude and time. During these shorter days and longer nights, as we may or may not put up a Christmas tree…

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2010: What Did We Believe In?

…virulent that hatred has become. Americans are willing to throw religious freedom and tolerance out the window, a posture all too familiar in the nation’s history and sadly contradictory to the sacred principles upon which this country was founded. Opposition to the construction of a Muslim community center in New York; the brutal attack on a Muslim cabbie; the proposed burning of Qur’ans by a small church that created a media sensation; the pass…

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The Breaking of Biblical Womanhood: The Problem With the Hot New Book Taking Aim at the Subjugation of Women in Evangelicalism

…anti-patriarchal. Barr reinterprets, for example, the so-called “household codes” in the New Testament, which uphold patriarchal order of man over wife (and master over enslaved), by attributing their oppressive hierarchies not to Jesus-followers but to the “fallen” world around them. “The early church,” she writes, “was trying to make sense of its place in both a Jewish and Roman world, and much of those worlds bled through into the church’s stor…

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Pope Francis’ Love Letter is an Opportunity Lost

…pled next door neighbors despite the fact that state and federal laws, tax codes, and neighborhood children do not notice any difference. Apparently nothing that was spoken by lay Catholics at the Synods (who merit nary a mention in the text) seeped into the writers’ consciousness—only what was uttered by the “Synod Fathers.” Whole swathes of new research on sex and gender are rejected without discussion. Outmoded notions remain about children nee…

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A New Mormon Religion Has Taken QAnon Conspiracies and Canonized Them as Doctrine

…, reads like word salad. For supporters, however, it’s a puzzle of cryptic codes and symbols that unveil a Satanic pedophile ring controlling the government. Beginning in 2018, the mysterious figure “Q” began detailing Donald Trump’s ascent to power and the “storm” that was coming to finally end control of the “Deep State” and corrupt government. Using “Q drops,” the cryptic 8Kun messages used to rally supporters, “Q” offered supposed intel to the…

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QAnon isn’t a Cult — a Problematic Term — But Michael Protzman’s Q-Adjacent ‘Negative48’ Certainly Is

…of state to join him. And all the while, the rhetoric is maintained—secret codes in the numbers, the dead are really alive, and the group should stay together. We know that “cult” is not an appropriate term for just any religious grouping. It’s a political term for a movement. But Protzman’s group bears all of the hallmarks of that problematic term, in the way we mean it post-Jonestown, post-Heaven’s Gate. And while they may make a distracting spe…

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The Heresy of End Times Predictions

…he elected readers for their generation, offered a way to crack the hidden codes of divine scripture. In most cases, the very belief that a given reader of the Apocalypse had been divinely appointed carried with it the clear implication that those times must be very close. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need such a close and spiritually esoteric reading at all. If that is, roughly speaking, how such apocalyptic calculations have looked and behaved in the…

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It’s the Theology, Stupid: Why the Shocking SBC Report is Anything But Surprising

…doubt that the use of “Letters of Good Standing” and the adoption of new “Codes of Conduct” (why either term is capitalized in the report is a mystery to me) will have much impact. Under the white supremacist patriarchy that still shapes so much of the American experience—not least in the SBC and similar churches—predatory white men will always be able to find people willing to attest to their “good character.” I’m reminded of Supreme Court “Just…

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After Roe: 3 Troubling Trends from the ‘Compassionate’ Anti-Abortion Crowd

…couldn’t understand why someone in his position could waste time with tax codes when there were so many babies to save. By the end of the session, our local representative was visibly shaken. I wonder whether he ever agreed to speak at a parochial school again. That episode has been at the front of my mind since news broke of the Dobbs decision, “among the Court’s worst decisions in history.” While there would never be a good time for the Supreme…

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What Protests and Executions in Iran Can Tell us About America and the Fall of Roe v. Wade

…tions of the principle we detail all the ways it reinforces and guarantees freedom and democracy; that this separation is a prerequisite for freedom and democracy because shielding our shared laws from any religion’s influence frees us to come together as equals and build a stronger democracy. The separation of religion and government is all of these and more. But it’s also simpler. The separation of religion and government is a basic human right….

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