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Dinos and Demons and Swedes, Oh My! It May Be Cartoonish, but Evangelical Radicalism Isn’t Just a Sideshow

…s in its insistence not only that there is no possibility for adjudicating between competing worldviews using human reason, but that our safest bet is to rely on the Holy Spirit and an essentially literal reading of the Bible for our understanding of truth. Christian presuppositionalists also argue that there can be no neutrality among competing worldviews, which is what allows them to so casually denounce points of view to which they are ideologi…

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Talking About Religion Will Not Help Romney

…ade most memorable by an aggressively wooden one-liner involving a $10,000 bet and Rick Perry, people who are kind of rooting for Mitt Romney (and kind of rooting is as good as he’s polling these days) are suggesting that candidate Romney should start talking about his Mormonism as a means of seeming, well, more human. All along, the conventional wisdom has been that Romney should avoid Mormonism, given the uncertainty it engenders in American vot…

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

…s the category of “religion.” RFI’s slogan is “Working to Secure Religious Freedom for Everyone, Everywhere.” But, in practice, they seem intent on challenging the freedom of minority religious groups like The Satanic Temple. They conceal this paradox by labeling religions they don’t like as “anti-religion forces.” According to RFI: “To say The Satanic Temple, which rejects God and hates religion, is a religion is to render as nonsense one of the…

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Why “Family Values” Defined Conservative Christianity (and Why “Religious Liberty” Has Replaced it)

…r rationales to sustain enrollment. The school found a winning strategy in promoting family values. LCA portrayed its mission as supporting Christian families and promised to shape young men and women who knew their place. A 1975 promotional brochure for the school advertised, “we have no hippies” and “you can tell our boys from our girls without a medical examination.” The relative lack of explicit racial rhetoric in the family values movement wo…

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Anti-Vaxxers Illustrate Danger of Overly Broad Religious Freedom Laws

…ed into the legislative history of each of these laws, I think it’s a fair bet that when they were passed the religious exemptions were intended to protect a very small percentage of the population with religious objections to vaccination, like Christian Scientists or some parts of the Amish community. It’s unlikely that the exemptions were intended to be used by the growing number of well-educated and well-off parents whose version of a “natural”…

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Vatican Council on Women Would Be Funny Were it Not So Insulting

…olic terms, are not. Imagine a similar discussion of the masculine body. I bet the mere suggestion of penis enlargements as a moral issue for men would stop more conversations than it would start. Try a simple substitute of ‘masculine’ for ‘feminine’ in this section of the document: Plastic surgery that is not medico-therapeutic can be aggressive toward the masculine identity, showing a refusal of the body in as much as it is a refusal of the ‘sea…

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Before Oprah, There Was the “Hour of Power”: Crystal Cathedral Pastor Robert H. Schuller Has Died

…ng financial problems and infighting among church staff — including a rift between Schuller and his son (and heir apparent) the Rev. Robert Schuller, Jr., over the direction of church ministry — the Crystal Cathedral filed for bankruptcy, eventually reaching a $57.5 million agreement with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange to purchase the gleaming architectural icon of American Protestantism. Exterior of the Crystal Cathedral, 2007. Image via Wi…

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The Man in the Red Dress: My Unlikely Friendship with Cardinal Francis George

…u say, ‘Well, that’s not so!’ You try to be polite, but people should know better,” he told me once as we discussed what he called “wrong ideas about God.” “Christ is not an idea. Christ is a person. But ideas about him are very important. If you have a wrong idea, that stops your growth in God,” he said. “People within the church should know better and just are ignorant of the facts, no matter what you think about them. That puzzles me.” We had o…

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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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What the Conservative Christian “Fake-Trans Bathroom Creeper” Has To Do With Suburban Anxiety

…That boundary is harder to find in most American cities, where the divide between “Anytown” and “the greater Anytown area” might not be a line at all, but a more gradual widening of lot sizes, along with some demographic shifts. A lot of people who aren’t residents of a city proper might have to do business in the city limits daily, both relying on and contributing to the city’s economic strength. Which brings us to Springfield, Missouri. And Fay…

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