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Good Hair, Good God! The Divine Politics of African-American Hair

…hat the hair cut for temple sacrifices is now the number-one export out of India. The fact that tonsure, a religious act, has turned into a profiteering scheme is remarkable. But there also exist unscrupulous people who are stealing women’s hair, either while they sleep or in movie theaters where their braids or hair hang over the seats; while a woman is enjoying the latest from Bollywood, someone is cutting her hair and exporting it to be sold in…

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Challenge to ‘un-Africanness’ of homosexuality; LGBT Catholics in Africa face church cooperation with persecution; lesbian cartoon project debuts in bangladesh under shadow of violence; Global LGBT Recap

…ing Dhee, we want to shape perception of LGBT people, because we should be free to choose whom to love,” Mehnaz Khan, one of the four content developers of Project Dhee, told the AFP news agency. The project was launched on Sept. 05 at Dhaka’s British Council, under tight security to avoid any protestors. “We don’t want to be stuck inside boxes anymore. We want our mind to be free,” Bangladeshi social activist Khushi Kabir told Dhaka Tribune. The…

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What To Do When Fred Phelps Arrives in Your Neighborhood

…ive. Yet, fantasy picketing in my imagination allows those of us who favor free speech (even free horrifying speech—remember Skokie and the Nazis) to express our outrage without giving up our commitment to free speech and, indeed, to express our outrage without being as offensive as those we find despicable. Not to mention avoiding the violence. And, of course, fantasy picketing gets around the many ways our culture has come to limit dissent in re…

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Tibet is Burning: Is the Freedom Movement Entering a New Phase?

…Thubten Ngodup, a 50-year-old exiled Tibetan living in India, died in the Indian capital, New Delhi, in April 1998 after he burnt himself to protest against the Chinese rule.  The radicalization of monks of such youth certainly raises a lot of important questions. Will there be more suicides in the weeks and months to come, and will it spill over into the exile community? Does the trend underscore the view that nonviolence does not mean a mere ab…

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What a Forgotten 19th Century Suffragist Can Teach Us About Women’s Rights vs. The Religious Right

…ity among the sexes and religions. Suffrage was part of the broader set of freedoms that Gage sought, but freedom goes well beyond that. What Gage saw was that you can’t just “get out the vote.” You have to change the mythologies. New stories need to be told, even if they are the old stories that have been forgotten.   [Research for this essay is greatly indebted to the ongoing work of Sally Roesch Wagner, and the Matilda Joslyn Gage Home in Fayet…

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Original Spin: Progressives Dismiss Conservative Theology at Their Peril

…w it, of the truly great evil: the subordination of every kind of personal freedom to the arbitrary will of the government. “Freedom has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline,” he said in his 1957 State of the Union address. “Should we persistently fail to discipline ourselves, eventually there will be increasing pressure on government to redress the failure. By that process freedom will step by step disappear.” Since, in this view,…

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Confront Death by Avoiding Fritos: The Gluten Lie, Fad Diets, & Foodie Faith

…or our own culture. People ask me, what’s the harm? Why not just go gluten free? And the answer is that going gluten free has all sorts of effects. It affects your relationship with your friends and family. It affects your relationship with your own past and foods that you love. While there might be some culture in which celebratory foods don’t typically contain gluten, that’s not our culture. Do you think there’s an incentive to setting yourself…

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Free Will, Fate and FiveThirtyEight: The Theology of Election Polls

…kind of freedom in order to have another. MHS: You mean that you trade the freedom to choose for the freedom of a world that feels unconstrained by predetermined trajectories? AL: Precisely. Which, bizarrely, means that free will is actually more constrained! MHS: Well, that’s kind of the ethic behind big data, right? That, at least in aggregate, decisions that feel like free choice actually follow very clear and pre-determined patterns, and these…

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Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

…y as practiced: slavery was not heritable (the children of slaves are born free, because, as Suleiman pointed out, the Qur’an assumes all persons are born free); that Muslims could not be enslaved (creating a tribal identity that transcended existing tribes); and that the offspring of slaves would be treated exactly as one’s own children. Slaves themselves should be fed, and clothed, and housed, at a standard commensurate with their owner’s wealth…

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The Problem of Evil in Free Market Theology

…mainline market theology may yet be seen for what it is: a heresy. In this new world, the belligerently pro-business wing of the Republican Party—with its unwavering commitment to free markets, deregulation, extended tax cuts, and an image of America as a providential city on a very wealthy hill—suddenly appears more clearly in its true light. They are the Gnostics, the elite heretics, whereas the Social Democrats are ironically true heirs to an o…

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