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Pastor of Kentucky Church Severed From Baptists Over LGBT Inclusion: Not Activism, Just Honesty

…years. I came about the time that folks from Burma began arriving in large numbers and uniting in membership with Crescent Hill, and much of my time in those early years was spent trying to figure out how in the world we might be able to be a unified body that includes people who don’t speak English, who have a completely foreign background and cultural experience. It took a lot of hard work but we reached a place a number of years ago where, whil…

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A Resurgence of “Ex-Gay Therapy” Under Trump/Pence? ABC News Report Offers a Platform to Hate Group Rep. Peter Sprigg

…president Tony Perkins was on the GOP committee that drafted that platform last year. In addition to several direct quotes from Sprigg that position same-sex attraction as a sinful choice that can be changed, the authors do not directly critique FRC’s framing of the harmful practice as benign-sounding “sexual reorientation therapy.” Although the article does include boilerplate statements from several leading medical and mental health organization…

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What To Do When Fred Phelps Arrives in Your Neighborhood

…rime the pump of protest and change. Certainly the strategy of using umbrellas to hide the distasteful words of Fred Phelps (forcing him into his own tiny little closet) or the angels in Laramie, Wyoming that stood between those “God Hates Fags” signs and the funeral of Matthew Shepard are forms of fantasy picketing though a tad more literal than what I had in mind.   This week, though the fantasy of fantasy picketing has become more real and more…

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

…ma at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival). Following its limited U.S. release last month it went on to win the Caméra d’Or (best first film) at the Cannes Film Festival. Most critics have gone out of their way to lavishly praise Beasts, with one writing that its “passionate and unruly explosion of Americana” that “reminds us not just of the unlimited possibilities of outside cinema, but of something true and intrinsic within ourselves.” Others have w…

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On the Taliban’s Hit List: An Exiled Pakistani Singer’s Plea to Save Music

…are of Mingora town. Journalist Shaheen Buneri has estimated that more than 800 music shops have been bombed or attacked in the Northwest since 2006. I spoke with a man who had personally witnessed Islamist thugs destroying traditional instruments in front of the players whose lives depended on them. It was against this backdrop that I put some questions to the man at the harmonium. Because of continuing danger at home, he wished to remain anonymo…

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My God, David Brooks

…lves spiritual, or religious, or both, or neither; when they encounter any number of mundane moments when questions of religion press upon them. But what if our choices vis-à-vis religion have some other complicated and fraught economy beyond that of the psychic? Might such choices never be choices to begin with, despite the fact that the a priori status of that choice has gained such philosophical and political currency over the last few hundred…

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Religious Right Targets Obama Picks, Daschle and Holder

…nvolvement [as deputy attorney general] in former President Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of Mark Rich, a major Democratic donor and billionaire financier charged with federal tax evasion.” Holder’s confirmation hearing, originally scheduled to begin in The Judiciary Committee last week, was delayed at the insistence of Republican committee members. “Some Senate Republicans see the Holder confirmation process, which will take place largely in…

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

…ms to be more or less okay with dropping $6.4 trillion—and killing at least 800,000 people—in an ineffective and counterproductive “war on terror.” When will we understand that defunding the police and defunding the Pentagon reflect one and the same struggle?) Finally, given how the practice of radical nonviolence implies a willingness to sacrifice, how much are you personally willing to sacrifice for the achievement of the long-awaited radical re…

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The Feds: Gamblers And Addicts

…ss federal mandates. The Centers for Disease Control, for instance, have a number of relatively small field stations, research facilities coordinating work on malaria and other blood-borne diseases. In the absence of a coherent alternative, they were ordered to become AIDS research labs as well. A great deal of the initial outlays went into converting relatively small field stations into much larger research laboratories called upon to expand thei…

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Catholic Church Ordained Women Before, Can Do it Again

…e trajectory of deacon-priest-bishop is relatively recent—only about 700 or 800 years in the long history of the Church. In fact, the earlier understanding is that the deacon would become a bishop! I sometimes wonder if the naysayers are more afraid of women bishops than of women priests. But, in modern times, we have reestablished the tradition of a diaconate lived permanently. All priests are also ordained deacons, and in the most formal of litu…

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