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Fatwa Allowing Women to Hit Their Husbands is Useless

…environment for the child. Children who live in abusive homes are often abused themselves and often perpetuate abuse in their adult relationships. How is staying married preferable for a woman who has children? One question that came to my mind is, “Is this it?” Is this all that Islamic scholars and authorities are willing to do to protect Muslim women?” From the BBC’s interview with a woman whose imam told her to keep quiet as she suffered domes…

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Disaster Theology: Blame and Powerlessness in Japan

…ear reactors? Certainly. Does it strengthen our resolve to develop an ever better understanding of seismology? You bet. Do these guarantee that, going forward into an age of accelerating climate change and rapidly depleting oil reserves, we won’t take one hit after another to our most deeply-held belief as modern people: that we can do a better job of running the planet than the planet can? No. There is no guarantee whatsoever that we will emerge…

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Akin and the God Factor

…morning, “It’s hard to reason with an idiot.” Or maybe, it’s just hard to use worldly logic on someone who is divinely inspired. But Ed Kilgore really gets inside Akin’s thinking: Very few if any of the people calling for him to step down supported his very recent primary candidacy; most either backed someone else or hoped he’d lose as the weakest of the potential Republican candidates. He represents a very self-conscious hard-core Christian Righ…

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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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Tea Party Bullies on Homosexuality: “No Punishment Too Severe?”

…DeMint reportedly said that people encouraged him in his position limiting freedom for gays and lesbians, saying he “shouldn’t back down. [The people who agree with him] don’t want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion.” As I reported here months ago, DeMint has been using a Christian Reconstructionist group’s mailing list for fundraising, indicating that, at least in part, he thinks he and they are compatible. Reconstructi…

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Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith Spouts Christian Nationalism Defending Racist Voter Suppression

…g, and essentially shut down “Souls to the Polls” initiatives historically used by Black churches to get out the vote. Hyde-Smith, the latest in a long and shameful line of senators from Mississippi—including mediocrities such as Theodore Bilbo and James Vardaman—rose to defend the measure that seeks to make it harder for people to vote if they don’t look like her. And she turned to a Christian Nationalist motto and the Bible to justify her defens…

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The Unsung Speech at Notre Dame, A Postmortem

…up; or in her case, not. I suspect that Judge Noonan was considered a safe bet to balance the pro-choice president: an eminence gris whose conservative Catholic bona fides are polished by his claim that a fetus is essentially a person from the time of conception. Regardless of his intentions, anti-choice people must have been deeply disappointed that he did not take one for the team. Despite his valiant if ineffective effort to link anti-abortion…

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The “Scandal” of the Catholic Vote

…a. Indeed, in Florida and California, their vote proved to be decisive…Because those who reject traditional values and religion voted heavily for Barack Obama, it’s a sure bet the culture war will only get hotter. We expect to be quite busy.” – Catholic Vote On Marriage And Family: Much To Cheer About, Bill Donahue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights “The passage of Proposition 8 was the result of an unprecedented coalition of ma…

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Hail Santa! War-on-Christmas Outrage Over Satanic Tree Reveals the Self-Serving Ambiguity of ‘Religion’

…ernment property in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, violated the establishment clause. The court ruled 5-4 that it did not, largely because the crèche was surrounded by other symbols that evoked Christmas but were not Christian, like Santa, reindeer, etc. As Sandra Day O’Connor explained in her concurrence, “The display celebrates a public holiday, and no one contends that declaration of that holiday is understood to be an endorsement of religion. The ho…

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Imus is Back… Of Course

…, what comes to mind for me when thinking of Imus is not necessarily his nauseating perversion, his obnoxious zeal for tragicomedy or his predilection for elementary forms of ‘shock’ discourse. Sure. He’s racist and sexist. I get that. Is this a problem? You bet! Does it make me cringe? Of course! But is it unfamiliar? Hell no! Racism and sexism are as American and foundational to our cultural make-up as democracy. Imus simply reflects America’s c…

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