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The Real Story Behind Rick Perry’s Secret Meetings with Pastors

…lly scheduled for August 6. His group did not just participate in a single phone call, as Amy Sullivan reported at TIME, but gathered for a two-day meeting June 21-22, which was a follow-up to a meeting Robison convened last September. The same day that Robison wrote in a blog post that “Christians must respond to the invitation issued by the prophet Joel to ‘return to God’,” Perry announced his rally, saying, “Some problems are beyond our power t…

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Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

…in mind. I can name the people who were my imagined audience. I have their numbers in my cell phone. There are, of course, lots of other people I would invite to eavesdrop on this solipsistic soliloquy. I’d like Bataille scholars to read the book. I’d like people who’ve never heard of Bataille to read the book. I’d like feminist and queer theologians—and those scholars who study queer theory—to read it. And if a serious scholar of Bacon’s or Mappl…

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How Does an Atheist Come to Believe in God?: An Interview with Jacob Needleman

…ills, I fished in my bag for the tiny microphone I planned to use with my iPhone, to record our conversation. “Is that what you’re using?” he asked, with great interest. He held up his own phone. “I just got one of these. Will this really work?” He sat next to me on the couch as I pointed him through the app store on his phone. “There it is,” I said, pointing to iTalk. “That’s what I’m using.” He tapped the screen, but the app that came up for dow…

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How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

…nd of “doubling down” on rationality is happening all over our society, according to Bell. He sees it in the fact that TED talks require you to talk about topics that you can prove with evidence—no spirituality allowed. You can hear it in New Atheist rhetoric, which, according to Bell, often mistakes the transrational for the pre-rational. “Right, the pre-rational and the transrational may be using the same language, but coming from a different pe…

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What Can a Real Life Haunting Tell Us About American Religion? [Updated]

…ouse. She reported that, whenever she tried to speak to this friend on the phone in the house about the haunting, the phone connection would be interrupted. As a busy woman with two kids, Maria doesn’t always have a lot of time to devote to spirituality, but when she does, she often relies on intuition. In the case of the haunting, she reports that her intuition pointed her toward the conclusion that it’s the land on which the house was built that…

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Conservative Rep Grills Oklahoma Personhood Sponsors

…tors are caught in the middle, and the voters themselves are… well… making phone calls and holding marches, because what else is there to do? (When I called the office of one member of the Public Health Committee to register my opposition to SB-1433, the staffer on the phone said, “Goodness, it seems like everyone in Oklahoma is calling.” I wearily replied that most of the calls must be in support of the bill, right? “Oh, no,” she said. “Against i…

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Godly Game or Godless Satire? Countering Biblical Ignorance with Heretical Humor

…the Old Testament because they’re long and boring…” Here pauses. “Granted, Numbers is like…” “I like Numbers, but anyway…” mumbles Caleb. “The real impetus for the game,” Thomas resumes, “is to get people to engage in Scripture and read stories they’ve never read before. When a concubine is cut up into twelve pieces, that imagery is really offensive. But a lot of people didn’t even know that story existed in the Bible.” I suspect they’re right; re…

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Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

…s pretty much it. Evangelical leaders themselves didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on convert…

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End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

…pleasurable, to find signs. We love realizing there is an arrow hidden in the FedEx logo, or that the eastern coast of South America fits snugly into the western coast of Africa. We want to know there is order, even if that order is malevolent. Satan, New World Order, Illuminati—any order is better than none. This is why, at the end of her talk, Christine Weick cannot help but smile….

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Global LGBT Recap: Nigeria Jails Gays, Russian Orthodox Spox Calls for Criminalization Referendum

…gotten so much traction that a group of prominent linguists declared the word “gender” the word of the year in Poland. Kozlowska sees Poland as the “front lines of Francis’s fight to reform the Catholic Church.” The movement in Poland is therefore indicative of the problems Francis faces in mollifying conservative elements among his flock. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, appeared happy to preside over what was often described as a “rump church,” o…

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