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Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

…’ and ‘To Be Alone with You’, Sufjan does well to collapse the distinction between divine- and human-directed affections—his ‘You’ could apply to God and loved one alike.” The former song’s title is a direct pull from the Book of Isaiah which reads in full, “For you will go out with joy/And be led forth with peace; The mountains and the hills will break forth into shouts of joy before you/And all the trees of the field will clap their hands.” The…

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Dinos and Demons and Swedes, Oh My! It May Be Cartoonish, but Evangelical Radicalism Isn’t Just a Sideshow

…ating between competing worldviews using human reason, but that our safest bet is to rely on the Holy Spirit and an essentially literal reading of the Bible for our understanding of truth. Christian presuppositionalists also argue that there can be no neutrality among competing worldviews, which is what allows them to so casually denounce points of view to which they are ideologically opposed, like environmentalism, as another “religion.” And they…

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How Herbalife’s Gospel of Health and Wealth Fuels a Billion-Dollar Deception

…world of prosperity gospel preachers, whose claims about the relationship between faith, donations to the church, and personal well-being strike many outsiders as a straightforward, money-motivated swindle. In the business of hope, there’s already very little overlap between the legal and the ethical—and, it seems, little clarity on where the legal marketing ends and the illegal stuff begins. What’s clear is that dreams are good business. It’s fi…

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US Offers Help For Investigation of Bangladesh Killings

…f practicing haredi men, whom he is convinced are closeted homosexuals. “I bet they have a wife and 10 kids waiting at home,” he says. “But the fact that they come here—it’s interesting, that they feel comfortable here.” A short time later, a swarthy bearded man wearing a beanie and a long black beard walks into the bar. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.) Al Bel rises to shout, “The rabbi is here!” The man, who asks not to be named, identi…

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Why “Family Values” Defined Conservative Christianity (and Why “Religious Liberty” Has Replaced it)

…d that feminists didn’t speak for all women. When anti-feminist women read Betty Friedan calling suburban homes a “concentration camp” for women, they took it personally. They felt such a statement demeaned their highest calling as women: to serve as wives and mothers. Leaders of the anti-feminist coalition capitalized on conservative women’s frustration with feminists. Phyllis Schlafly insisted that the Equal Rights Amendment was “anti-family, an…

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Will SCOTUS Call the “Bluff” of Religious Liberty Activists?

…going to allow religious objectors to completely opt-out of laws by continually re-defining the burden on their religious exercise, regardless of the impact on third parties and the harms done to them. And you can bet if that strategy succeeds here, we’ll see it in use very soon in other contexts, like exemptions to LGBT non-discrimination laws and marriage equality protections. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that….

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How Would Religion Respond to Extraterrestrials? A Thought Experiment

…changes such radical discoveries might manifest in religion? I’m going to bet that religion is not going to disappear. If anything, the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence might look a bit like the sixteenth century, when Europeans first began to grapple with the fact that the western hemisphere contained two massive continents with millions of inhabitants. But, as to specifics: how could Christians maintain the special election of humanit…

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The Plot to Turn the Synod into a “Plot”

…nt of the total number of the members mentioned in articles V and VIII. Despite this, Douthat assures us that “as a Catholic,” he expects “the plot to ultimately fail; where the pope and the historic faith seem to be in tension, my bet is on the faith.” It’s a measure of how deeply conservative Catholics identify the “faith” with the doctrinal orthodoxy of JP II and Benedict that Douthat actually believes he speaks for Catholics more authentically…

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What the Conservative Christian “Fake-Trans Bathroom Creeper” Has To Do With Suburban Anxiety

…That boundary is harder to find in most American cities, where the divide between “Anytown” and “the greater Anytown area” might not be a line at all, but a more gradual widening of lot sizes, along with some demographic shifts. A lot of people who aren’t residents of a city proper might have to do business in the city limits daily, both relying on and contributing to the city’s economic strength. Which brings us to Springfield, Missouri. And Fay…

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Women’s Equality in the Church is No Longer Negotiable

…r what grounds them biologically. Being “created in the image of God” is a better bet. We are all learning together about this, some of us more willing to admit what we do not know than others. But we can certainly agree in the meantime that persons trump genitals, that competence and willingness to serve are far more relevant than gender identity when it comes to Christian life. This means ordination and decision making for women on a par with me…

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