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The Sacred and the Dead: Three Ways to American Beauty

…Candyman’s in town” This is the grateful seduction, sometimes for good, many times for ill, but real any way you slice it. Two more times for the Dead to, in the words of bassist Phil Lesh, “suck the last dance right out of you…” How much are those tickets to the very last gigs at Soldier Field this weekend going for? For real? You got to be kidding me! I could feed a family for a month for that price. But one can’t put a price on American Beauty…

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Angry Voters, Right-Wing Populism, & Racial Violence: People of Faith Can Help Break the Linkages

…e supremacist movements.” I catch up with the Rev. David Ostendorf by cell phone while he is waiting for a plane at an East Coast airport. He is the executive director of the CNC where Ward works. Ostendorf, A United Church of Christ minister, once led PrairieFire Rural Action, a group that tried to save family farms during a major agricultural economic crisis in the 1980s. “Back then we helped build a popular economic political movement among fam…

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Busy Days For ‘eBay of Prophecy’

…rning the end of the world.” In addition to Rapture Ready Wallpaper, and a number of ads for books (Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrewby Haim Shore), a very scary graphic novel (Armageddon Now: World War III), videos (“Rapture—End Times”), and dating aids (“Meet Christian Singles”—obviously something that should be done sooner than later), RaptureReady.com’s front page features a slew of bad-news articles with headlines that almost m…

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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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Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

…Go to any university in America and you’ll come across a disproportionate number of Muslims. Before Dawkins can cry, ‘You succeed in the West but not the non-West!’—and thereby claim the superiority of the West he and I are both happily a part of—note that American Muslims have, on the whole, done much better than Western European Muslims. Whose fault is that? Why are Muslims succeeding culturally, creatively, and scientifically, in America, but…

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Welcome to the Shari’ah Conspiracy Theory Industry

…inence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the United States and its Constitution.” Based on the “explanatory memorandum” document identifying a number of American Muslim organizations as allies in its author’s aspirations, prosecutors in the Holy Land Foundation trial publicly labeled over 200 American Muslim organizations “unindicted co-conspirators,” a highly controversial move derided at the time by legal experts as…

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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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Lo and Behold, the Sacredness of the Internet

…lace in Lo and Behold. Behind an image of Tibetan monks staring into their phones with the Chicago skyline behind them Herzog asks “Have the monks stopped meditating? They all seem to be tweeting.” But the power of the internet is not in a few addicts who can’t pull themselves away from their screens, rather it’s in its omnipresence. Herzog avoids the everday aspect of the net (and attendant statistics) looking instead for the colorful and odd ind…

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None Means None (Not Atheist, Agnostic, Unbeliever…)

…belief or unbelief. The Pew report on the religiously unaffiliated in the United States does focus substantially on belief, offering a number of significant findings among Nones. I’ve discussed some of these previously here and here, but the pervasiveness of the idea that Nones are unbelievers suggests that the major data highlights bear repeating: 68% of the Unaffiliated in general believe in God or a Universal Spirit Among those who self-identi…

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