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How Intelligent Design Advocates Helped Shape the Christian Right’s Texas Curriculum Standards

…oping a line of legal reasoning that the future lawyers in her class might use, she wove her way to two Supreme Court cases in the 1960s, in both of which the court ruled that prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. A student questioned the relevance of the 1777 event to the court rulings, because in 1777 the country did not yet have a Constitution. “And what did we have at that time?” Dunbar asked. Answer: “The Declaration of Independence….

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Upside Down Judaism: Why Are Progressives Studying Talmud?

…of the social justice movements (especially around worker justice issues) used Yiddish as an organizing language but spoke “American.” The conceptual vocabulary of the union movement and the socialist movement was embraced by the Jewish participants in those movements; and continued to be used when those Jews started their own organizations, such as the American Jewish Congress. During the seventies (which was, for all intents and purposes, when…

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Excerpt: The Christian Roots of Zionism

…ways, some more sophisticated than others. While some advocates of Zionism used it to imply that Palestine was empty of people, that suggestion was contradicted by the reports of many Western visitors. The phrase was most pointedly used to claim that the Arabs of Palestine had no distinct Palestinian identity. They were ‘‘Arabs,’’ not a cohesive national group. That Palestine was not ‘‘empty’’ (in either the demographic or political sense) soon be…

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A Jew in Church? No Big Deal

…y fond words for John Hagee, joining the ranks of shortsighted Jews who refuse to see the profound crackpot anti-Semitism lurking beneath the Texas pastor’s support for Israel. My Jesus Year therefore represents something of an odd chapter in the history of Jews and church, but one that may very well be indicative of the forces at play in our time. Clearly, if even a nice Orthodox boy can get permission to do it, the act of a Jew entering into a C…

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Jennifer’s Body and Why I Like Buffy’s Body Better

…h century, silent film actress Theda Bara became the archetypal “vamp” who used sex to lure men to their deaths while Adele Farrington, in a pre-Code romp called The Devil’s Bondwoman (1916), portrayed a woman whose sexual appetites were so insatiable that she attracted Satan himself. By the 1940s, a comic book entitled Madame Satan [see image left] told a similar story to adolescents of a seductive woman who, using Satan’s supernatural power, att…

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The Gray Lady’s Regard: Ritual and the Wedding Pages

…Weddings/Celebrations tempts satiric demolition by its readership; not because the formulas are inherently foolish but because to believe love might be made from a formula is. But these couples are not joking: these bricks, so neatly stated, armor against life’s vicissitudes. If only. At its hip-swinging height, love permeates, pressing between gritted teeth and crow’s feet, between the tedium of a day and the discontents of whatever profession. E…

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Capitalism and the Anti-Modern Pope

…ity in the relatively near future. So, if Euro-America is a lost Vatican cause, then where is the Church growing? Where is its future? The answer seems relatively clear. The Church is growing in South America, in sub-Saharan Africa, and is even making significant inroads in the Far East. And what these emerging Catholic populations want is a culturally conservative theology (recall the uproar in these same regions when the openly gay Anglican bish…

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Angels & Demons: America’s Preeminent Pop Theologian Takes on Religion and Science

…Darwin. Since The Origin of Species appeared in 1859, there’s been little use hoping for convergence. Europe has fallen for secular scientism, and the United States for semi-closeted creationism. The best one can expect is a habitable truce. So where is Dan Brown’s confidence coming from? Deep in the American psyche, it turns out. Since colonial times there has been a gnostic strain running through our religious imagination, one that could embrac…

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Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?

…ntion to things we might not otherwise notice. But caricatures cease to be useful when they’re confused with the real thing; when the critic invites his audience to deride the real thing based on the absurdity of the caricature. This is what Dawkins does in his little “note” to potential Free Inquiry subscribers. And it isn’t helpful. There is such a thing as helpful satire, as comic lampooning that highlights the truth. And then there are caricat…

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Overnight Sensation ‘The Rich Men North of Richmond’ isn’t Just a Window into a Forgotten America — It’s an Invitation into a Worldview

…ot to pay for your bags of fudge rounds It’s hard not to read “welfare” as code. Welfare has long been used in conservative circles as a dog whistle for Black people, immigrants, and others who are supposedly too lazy to work and thus draining the life from our society. The idea of the “welfare queen,” a single Black urban mother, was introduced by Ronald Reagan in 1976: “At a campaign rally in 1976, Ronald Reagan introduced the welfare queen into…

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