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Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

…ilization is only on the surface. One day people will riot in much greater numbers than in the late eighties”… Today, the person who controls the two banners [of religion and nationality] in Tibet is none other than the Dalai Lama, who enjoys the status both of the highest spiritual leader and the internationally recognized symbol of Tibetan nationhood. These remarkably candid words from one of China’s most important writers on Tibetan issues demo…

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Is the Satanic Temple Just an Elaborate Prank? 10 Questions for the Author of ‘Speak of the Devil’

…Most Americans claim to value tolerance and religious freedom. But talk is cheap, especially if you have never seriously thought about what these commitments might actually mean in a pluralistic society. I was disturbed to read some of TST’s Christian opponents openly renouncing religious freedom if it meant respecting the freedoms of Satanists. I also think TST is forcing the public to think more critically about what “religion” is. They are dire…

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“Hey You! Anti-Semite!”: A Jewish Krewe does Mardi Gras

…es, clubs, and the chance to rub elbows with dealmakers and power brokers. Today non-discrimination membership policies are a prerequisite to parading through public streets. However, some of the oldest clubs, including the original Comus, have stopped parading because they would rather not disclose their membership standards. Jews were often, but not always, excluded from these patently goyisha festivities. In 1872 the first Rex, “King of Carniva…

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Springtime for Ross Douthat?

…y now), Gustavo Gutierrez, Marcus Borg, James Cone, Sallie McFague, or any number of other thinkers and theologians that Douthat does not recognize. The only people who want to bring back Niebuhr are conservatives. (I’m an admitted fanboy, but that’s about coming from the same church background as Niebuhr as much as anything.) And that doesn’t even get to the worst of it. Douthat misunderstands Francis’ amazing, charismatic realignment of Catholic…

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Romney Goes to Bat Against Reid in Nevada

…ast two decades, more than 1.4 million people moved to Nevada in search of cheap housing and boom-time fueled hospitality, tourism, and construction jobs, more than doubling the state’s population. Now, those speculation-and-spending fueled good times are gone. That volatility does not treat mild-mannered Mormon politicians well: be they Reids, or Romneys. Just last week, Jan Shipps, a longtime scholar and canny observer of Mormon experience, wage…

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Hater Pastor Loses His Wife of 42 Years, Uses the Occasion to Trash Gays

…dy and that is morally wrong.” But, using your wife’s death to score a few cheap political points against a group of people you hate isn’t “morally wrong”?  But wait, there’s more! Garlow also uses his dead wife to point out just how fake the relationships between living, loving gay and lesbian partners really are. He talks about the delight he experienced being married to his wife, something gay and lesbian people certainly couldn’t have, right?…

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An Open Letter to Black Clergy on the Disdain for Protest

…y or by a wannabe Martin Luther King. While the President sermonized about cheap grace, a daughter of the church climbed a flagpole and took down the American swastika. Like Mary and Elizabeth, Bree Newsome proclaimed that our salvation—wrapped in swaddling clothes—is here in our hands. As an ordained clergyperson nurtured in the bosom of the black church, I am all too familiar with the way in which we tend to spiritualize the material suffering o…

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Despising the Holidays: When Christians Led the ‘War on Christmas’

…became the equivalent of a blockbuster. In the chaos of the era print was cheap and plentiful, and the collapse of the licensing laws insured a degree of free speech hitherto unknown in the British Isles. The World Turned Upside Down would prove so enduring that it has been an English folk ballad for more than 350 years. The song’s opening verse, “Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d. /Old Christmas is kicked out of Town” remains per…

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Why the ‘Confession & Redemption’ Path is Unlikely to Help Falwell Recover from Sex Scandal

…aders caught up in sex scandals, and most commentators predicted this same cheap grace for Falwell when he was recently forced to take an indefinite leave of absence from Liberty after posting a picture of himself with his pants unzipped, his arm around the waist of a similarly (un)dressed woman who was not his wife, and a glass of something that looked suspiciously like alcohol in his hand. According to two experts on evangelicals and gender, how…

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Watching Preachers’ Daughters Right After the Boston Bombings While Teaching a Class on Augustine’s Confessions

…the reductive “purity” rhetoric with something reductive of my own, like a cheap criticism that Christianity is anti-sex and anti-body. Which brings me to Augustine’s Confessions, and specifically, reading Augustine’s Confessions with my Intro Theology class this week. Internet, I love Augustine Confessions. I love, love, love, love Augustine’s Confessions. I love it even when I want to throw it across the room and curse. It’s a complicated love,…

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