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Conservative Rep Grills Oklahoma Personhood Sponsors

…tors are caught in the middle, and the voters themselves are… well… making phone calls and holding marches, because what else is there to do? (When I called the office of one member of the Public Health Committee to register my opposition to SB-1433, the staffer on the phone said, “Goodness, it seems like everyone in Oklahoma is calling.” I wearily replied that most of the calls must be in support of the bill, right? “Oh, no,” she said. “Against i…

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Is There Hope for a Truly Progressive Evangelicalism? An Interview with Deborah Jian Lee

…he cancer that had crawled across his body, had lain in bed at home with a phone against his ear while my pastor, who had called him from the pulpit, pointed a cordless phone toward the congregation; we all wept and sang him love songs as he lay dying. These are uniquely evangelical experiences that shaped me, that will always be a part of me. I still long for this kind of community—the kind that journeys together through all the peaks and valleys…

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Vatican Considers ‘Disordered’ Language; HBO Doc on LGBT Persecution in Russia; Nigerian Bishop Shifts on Anti-Gay Law; Arson at ‘Open Mosque’ in South Africa; Global LGBT Recap

…lice reportedly detained the pair at a bus stop and confiscated Mr. Cole’s phone. They then used images they found on the phone as evidence to arrest and convict Mr. Cole for homosexuality. Homosexuality is a criminal offense in Morocco, and relations outside of marriage can also be punishable by law. Italy: Mayors Resisting National Govt on Registering Gay Couples Several mayors are pledging to disobey the Interior Minister’s announcement that ga…

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Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

…in mind. I can name the people who were my imagined audience. I have their numbers in my cell phone. There are, of course, lots of other people I would invite to eavesdrop on this solipsistic soliloquy. I’d like Bataille scholars to read the book. I’d like people who’ve never heard of Bataille to read the book. I’d like feminist and queer theologians—and those scholars who study queer theory—to read it. And if a serious scholar of Bacon’s or Mappl…

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The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

…rms, Pew has given us a narrow, skewed insight into how a select subset of Americans respond to leading questions, posed by strangers, over the phone. But it’s science! Public opinion polling ends up existing in a strange gray space between science and journalism. A Pew report is definitively not a scientific paper: its goal is to serve media outlets, not to advance a body of academic inquiry. It’s not peer-reviewed. Its methods lack the scope and…

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Gay, Christian, Pagan, Artist: How Matt Morris Defies the Borders of Spiritual Identity

…f the church in our spiritual-but-not-religious age. Do you think that the American church can recover from it? I think it depends on whether the American church decides to live into an identity that affirms the love of God for all people. It’s not like it’s a wound from the past. It’s a wound in the present. Everyone wants live into Easter, but no one wants to be on Good Friday. Everyone wants to live in Resurrection, but no one wants to recogniz…

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End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

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American Civil Religion is Dead, Long Live American Civil Religion

…cultures while they are also expected to understand and respect the common American culture; 4. We acknowledge the nobility of the American experiment even as we acknowledge certain “flaws” that God needs to “mend” (in the prayer-hymn wording of Katherine Lee Bates). Now suppose we update this problematic creed for the sake of telling the truth, junking the impossible notion that God has somehow chosen the United States for a special destiny or is…

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As Transition Looms, Jewish Studies is Mired in Controversy

…posite. They claim that “historical and critical theory have much to offer American Jewish sociology and American Jewish Studies.” The question is: what tools will be deployed to best navigate that engagement, making explicit what’s at stake and bringing a critical eye to the normative claims embedded in our habits and language? *** One of the questions that has consistently plagued Jewish Studies in the academy is where it belongs. Two possibilit…

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Has American Conservatism Abandoned the Christian Right?

…ny in the deep resonances between Hochman’s and Weyrich’s statements about American conservatism. In a recent guest essay at the New York Times, Hochman argues that contemporary American conservatism has left the Christian Right—which was inspired by Goldwater and built by Weyrich, along with Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and many others—behind in favor of a more secular, expansive, and dynamic movement that’s protecting a “beleaguered American way o…

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