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Churches Can No Longer Hide the Truth: Daniel Dennett on the New Transparency

…issue of Scientific American, Deb Roy and I compare this to the Cambrian Explosion. The Cambrian Explosion happened 540 million years ago, when there was a sudden, very dramatic explosion of different life forms in response to some new change in the world. Oxford zoologist Andrew Parker argues that the increased transparency of the ocean made eyesight possible, and this changed everything: now predators could see prey, and prey could see predator…

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Don’t Be Tooken In by Kimmy Schmidt‘s Cult

…perfect commitment to tackling race, class, and sexual violence—Tina Fey’s new Netflix comedy, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, falls prey to a classic American media blunder: it portrays new religious movements as deceptive and dangerous, full of brainwashed women in need of saving. Fey and co-creator Robert Carlock had planned to call the show “Tooken,” “like that’s the way a child speaks about something that is taken from them,” Fey explained in a re…

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The New Christianity: What the Mainstream Media Has Missed

…, amidst the tumult of a presidential election, establish an audience for explaining a new school of thought that cuts radically against the grain of orthodox thought? Had we been able to plausibly link her to any of a number of cults or minor religions that people had at least heard of before, our work might actually have stuck in people’s minds. So there weren’t any cognitive reference points. Memory is relational—new information that fits preex…

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Breaking Up With Marilynne Robinson Over Her Refusal to Acknowledge the Dark Side of Puritanism

…lzer writes that exodus stories—the original one, of course, but also the exodus stories written by New England settlers and by South African Boers and by the founders of the modern State of Israel—tend to skip lightly over the downside of their God-sent liberation: the taking of others’ land and the effective erasure of the seized land’s inhabitants and of their story. Walzer asks, “Is it a feature of revolutionary history that newly liberated an…

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Hitching a Freedom Ride: Gay Ain’t the New Black…

…. the relationship between racism and classism, or the cultural connection between sexism and homophobia), they are still distinguishable and historically contingent. Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ageism, etc., are all independent categories. We know that white women can fight against male hierarchy even as they ignore their own complicity in terms of racial stratification. And middle-class African Americans can challenge racial discrimina…

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The New “Values Voters” Mantra

…ontend, are not granted by either document, only recognized in them; these rights exist only because they were granted by God.  That “endowed by the Creator” argument has been made repeatedly by Republican politicians in speeches lately, including Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich. That’s the new “values voters” rhetoric: government is a tyrant, disobedient to God. Sure, all the anti-gay, anti-abortion, and anti-secularism stuff i…

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New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

…tities and prophets” under articles 98, 160, and 161 of the Egyptian Penal Code. According to Egypt News Daily, the prosecution first sought to charge him in connection with disseminating Innocence of Muslims but when this accusation was proven false, they revised their strategy to target the content of Saber’s video blog. Though sentenced to three years and released on bail he was subsequently locked up due to a clerical error before being releas…

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Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

…tudios have generated considerable media attention. Unplug is planning to expand to New York and London, Yalof Schwartz told me. And both seem to be filling classes, although, at least in the case of MNDFL, it’s hard to tell whether group classes are actually intended to drive profits, or whether it’s the merchandise, corporate classes, and individual instruction that will really bring in cash. The bigger question is whether this trend will contin…

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Is New Pope’s Take on the Poor All That New?

…c recovery of the true essence of Liberation Theology, devoid of all its noxious Marxist trappings. The call for frugality and simplicity seems to have its limits. As Francis prepares to travel to Brazil to attend the 2013 World Youth Day, reports have surfaced that the Vatican has asked the country and the city of Rio de Janeiro to pitch in an additional $39 million to cover a shortfall in funding for the visit. Brazil and Rio had already forked…

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How a Bill O’Reilly Bestseller Helps Explain the Anti-Semitism Behind the Poway Shooting

…ing book on Jesus in recent years, Killing Jesus: A History by disgraced Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly and sports writer Martin Dugard, both Roman Catholics. When the book was first published in 2013, the New Testament scholar Candida Moss adeptly critiqued its “historical” methodology and entrenched conservative bias, exposing it as “fan fiction.” O’Reilly and Dugard’s interpretation of the gospels in Killing Jesus was motivated by the same polit…

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