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Racist Remarks by popular BYU Religion Professor Spark Controversy

By Joanna Brooks

…hurch’s historic prohibition on priesthood ordination for men of African descent was a “blessing” to blacks because they were not “ready” for priesthood authority. “God has always been discriminatory” when it comes to whom he grants the authority of the priesthood, says Bott… Bott compares blacks with a young child prematurely asking for the keys to her father’s car, and explains that similarly until 1978, the Lord determined that blacks were not…

The Burning Houses of Worship We Missed

By Gordon Haber

…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…

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

By Andrew L. Seidel

…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…

What Coverage of a Fatal Orthodox Baptism Reveals About Western Media

By Katherine Kelaidis

…er, both Origen and Tertullian, writing in the early to mid 2nd century, describe the practice as customary. We do know that nearly every early Christian community practiced full-immersion baptism. The Greek word βάπτω, from which the word baptism derives, means “to dunk.” Baptism by affusion (that’s the sprinkling of water that you will see in most Western churches, both Catholic and Protestant) initially emerged as a concession, probably in the…

Something So Broken: What’s Frightening About Beasts of the Southern Wild

By Michael Pasquier

…astal Louisiana’s environmental and cultural endangerment in ways that transcend scientific studies and government policies, while at the same time reaching national and international audiences. The film’s attraction is its story, its characters, and its aesthetic. Its success has everything to do with Court 13’s joyful ethic of respect and love for the people and places they represent in film. My fear, however, is that those who watch Beasts of t…

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

By Joanna Brooks

…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 “perversion files” report that fewer than 2% of the cases documented therein are connected with Mormons. It is believed that LDS Chu…

Why #FreeBritney is an #Exvangelical Cause

By R.L. Stollar

…spoke with Bethany Grace, who, like me, was raised in the evangelical homeschooling movement, and who is (full disclosure) a friend. Grace wrote on social media that Spears’s conservatorship is “evangelicals’ dream of what to do with all of us backslidden daughters.” When I asked her to expand on her comment she told me, “A conservatorship for a functioning adult just seems like a logical extension of a belief system that gives unparalleled autho…

The Radical Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Left’s Challenge Today

By Peter Laarman

…a second way by sending the poorest to do the fighting and dying; King is scandalized that the United States finds it possible to make poor whites and poor Blacks fight and kill Asians together but won’t allow them to be schooled together here at home. War’s organized lethal violence represents a defeat for the wider cause of nonviolence—and here is where King enraged liberals and conservatives alike by calling the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of…

New Poll: Repeal DOMA

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…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…

My God, David Brooks

By John Modern

…spirituality. Choice vis-à-vis religion is self-evident and a good thing. Scholars and scientists alike have made a career out of framing religious history as a history of choice. And we, in turn, expect everything to be not just voluntary but also on-demand. But might these everyday acts within our chooser-palooza world occlude from consciousness our acceptance of a tradition that is neither religious nor secular but one that demands that we hav…