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Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

…is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited by combining just a few digits. But since I’m a minimalist, I’d be quite content with a randomly ordered list. I’m confident that…

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Is Alcoholics Anonymous a Religion?

…d back in 2014, defended itself by invoking section 18 of the Human Rights code, which allows a religious group to restrict participation to the faithful. So while AA presents itself to the public as a “spiritual” program, distinguishing itself from “religious” groups, it nevertheless claimed “religious” legal status in order to protect itself. Although the definition of “religion” is generally assumed in common parlance, it is not in any sense ea…

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Conservative Christian Book on Obama’s Faith

…eld said that “Gen. Boykin gave many in the field just the kind of warrior code they needed to fulfill their duties with moral passion.” In an extensive, and highly-documented, review of Mansfield’s Ten Tortured Words, Rodda, pointed out that the book was shot full of a series of historical errors and noted that “Mansfield makes David Barton, whose masterpiece of historical revisionism, Original Intent, is listed in the bibliography of Ten Torture…

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Gandhi, his Grandson, Israel, and the Jews

…fe holy […] what in Hindu religious feeling and in Gandhi’s religiosity is signified by Dharma corresponds to the Code of Law, in the Jewish way of life. Eight years after Gandhi’s assassination, the Gandhians political exile was evident to Martin Luther King. When King visited India in 1956, he split his time and attention between representatives of the Indian government and the students of Gandhi and quickly became aware of the tension between t…

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Dispatches from the Beltway: Beyond the Graying and Greening Religious Right

…ical community, one that represents not simply a broader agenda but also a significantly different spirit and worldview. Last week, Dr. David Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University and author of The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center, talked compellingly about the arrival of the evangelical center at a standing-room-only presentation at Third Way, a progre…

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Glenn Beck Hijacks It’s a Wonderful Life

…nd active commitment to “social justice,” something that Beck has said are code words for Communism and Nazism. Look, Frank Capra wasn’t exactly known for his subtle messages. Yet, somehow, Beck manages to reinterpret the movie through an unregulated free-market ideological Ayn Rand prism and message of Christian conservatism. For real? Either Beck has never watched the movie, or he’s so conservatively deluded that he thinks Mr. Potter is the hero…

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Jennifer’s Body and Why I Like Buffy’s Body Better

…rings true in her take on it, in a script that crackles and pops with her signature dialogue. She tries to do even more, as she makes clear when she recently described the film as a “Trojan horse” meant to sneak a feminist message into the cineplex, subverting the paradigm of horror films in which women are merely the shrieking victims of male violence. I admire Cody’s effort, but am not sure she has subverted older paradigms as much as made them…

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GMO or No: Problematic Intersections of Religion, Biotechnology, and Food

…s Toward Food in Late Imperial China.” While Chinese food policy affects a significant percentage of the world population, it seems problematic to present “Chinese food culture” as a monolithic way of life. The piece looks at concepts like the five elements and yin-yang but lacks a specific spiritual context I expected from the piece. The focus of Ping-chen’s writing is not on spiritual food ritual but on medicinal treatments and food remedies. Wh…

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We Would Be Wise to Pay Attention to Trump’s Apocalyptic QAnon Posting Spree

…ind him. He holds in his right hand a ghostly “Q+” (according to some, the code name Trump himself uses when he posts on Q message boards) and the text reads “The World Will Soon Understand/Nothing Can Stop What is Coming,” a direct reference to “The Storm.” As I wrote back in 2020: The QAnoners’ apocalypse, unsurprisingly, is one of political partisan violence, culminating in “The Storm,” when all of the so-called “deep state leaders” will be arr…

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In Crisis, Catholic Church Plays ‘The Jew’

…certed “Zionist attack.” For those unclear that “Zionist” in some minds is code not for the problematically successful movement toward Jewish self-determination, but rather for the fabled machinations of the Elders of Zion, the speaker continued: “They do not want the church. They are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers.” Babini has since denied ownership of these words (though the Guardian noted his leg…

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