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LDS Leaders Owe Repentance and Apology for Cruelty to LGBTQ People and Their Children

…hristianity’s most celebrated ideals?) The statement is akin to a customer service rep lamenting the fact that their employer doesn’t give them the power to solve the problem a customer is reporting. You can all but hear Dallin H. Oaks and Russell M. Nelson of the First Presidency saying, “Look, don’t blame us for the fact that God finds your gayness abhorrent! We’re just messengers!” There’s no acknowledgment of stewardship, no admission of agenc…

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It’s Unanimous: No “Moderates” in GOP Field

…ttom line problem with education is the education system doesn’t serve the customer…who’s the customer? The parents because it’s the parents’ responsibility to educate the children….At some point we have…the government has…convinced parents that at some point it’s no longer their responsibility and in fact they forced them in many respects to turn their children over to the public education system and wrest control from them and blocked them out o…

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Sarah Palin: Bus Tour of Destruction

…lidifying a new hard right religious base, and making enough money to turn Alaska into the New Jerusalem. I’m only jesting about one of these pronouncements; but the fact is, Palin isn’t about rebuilding. She’s about destruction. There is a reason she was called “rogue.” Leave it to Saturday Night Live to once again capture the essence of Sarah Palin. In a deft mashup of the film 2012 and campaign clips, the destruction that ensues from the electi…

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No Bible-as-State-Book for Tennessee as Legislators Suffer “Symbol Fatigue”

…name new state symbols in 2015, according to the AP. Intrepid citizens of Alaska spearheaded an effort to get Miss Alaska named as the state hostess. There was an effort in Massachusetts to designate a state Tai Chi form. Some folks in Maine appealed to their state legislature to get the Friendship sloop designated as the official maritime sloop of the state of Maine. Ohioans also sought out sloop-related recognition, appealing to their state’s g…

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“The Camp Is a Ceremony”: A Report From Standing Rock

…t simply a story of settlers versus natives. When I did research on oil in Alaska, there were some Natives who were profiting from oil and gas leases, and others, specifically the Gwich’in, who had chosen to remain outside of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and not sell their future for a mess of oil pottage. I spoke to a water protector and he indicated that the line between those for and against the pipeline runs between family and triba…

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The New Christianity: What the Mainstream Media Has Missed

…in 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 preexisting patterns of knowledge tends to stick. Information that doesn’t tends not to. I suspect much of our writing got momentarily noticed, as be…

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To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

…his own salvation. Not surprisingly, alongside the teaching of (Christian) service and free enterprise, college business programs also taught students to be wary of government encroachments in the form of taxes, regulations, or oversight. But these same programs gladly took government aid and encouraged students to use federal funds to further their own professional goals. Government was a one-way street: the expectation was that it should support…

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Free Arabs: Satire, Disobedience, and Disclaimers

…, the same (almost identically the same) way that Muslim clergy, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, appropriated the Iranian revolution of 1977–1979 entirely for itself, far beyond their own fair share. Free Arabs is right to expose religious anti-intellectualism or fight for the rights of atheists in Arab societies, but their defiance would be much more effective if it rose above colonial constructs of secularists versus Muslims or Islamists. Satirizing…

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Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

…well as their bodies and their polities, are shackled; they will never be free unless or until they embrace freedom as an absolute, unqualified good. In light of this genealogy, one must recognize the beguiling simplicity of the blame game—that ‘rage’ is entirely the problem of those enraged. They are not like us. They take religion to be a sacred cow, while we know that freedom of expression is the first, fundamental, basis of democracy, and tha…

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