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The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

…ictim he could denigrate. He united all the Germans against the Jews. It’s cheap politics, but we still have people who know how to do that. It doesn’t lead to anything but destruction. How can reeducating ourselves about the Bible—and educating the non-religious about the Bible—help us regain the center? One of my hopes for this book is that it will provide a textbook to talk about the Bible in a new way. A local pastor doesn’t have to actually s…

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A Shining City: The Occupy Movement and the American Soul

…der dresses and ridiculously high-heeled shoes. They sipped from splits of cheap sparkling wine while their tuxedoed companions swilled the local brew, Budweiser—that, too, a faded American icon, sold off in 2008 to the Belgium-based multinational, InBev. No, of course, these were not the protesters who have begun to appear in more and more American cities, but keepers of the once-stable base of a certain version of the fabled American Dream: wedd…

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Richard Dawkins’ Atheist Academy of Unguided Truth

…God loves you because your priest told you so? And so on.  These were not cheap shots. He was serious. He loved us, he loved his job, and his questions were troubling. Some students wept. At which point he would offer Kleenexes. It was in Fr. Cavanaugh’s class that I began to see that all true education is intensely personal. Dawkins’ distaste for an officially atheist academy may be mere iconoclasm. But maybe not. Maybe it’s closer to the truth…

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Gas For Two Bucks a Gallon? Bachmann Taps a Pipeline to the American Sacred

…sn’t long before it came to be known as “Shermageddon.” These references reflect something larger, truer, more apt than the events they were coined to describe—in Eliadian terms, they were profane events positioned within a sacred reality, namely the invocation of a biblical reference to Har Megiddo or Mount Megiddo (in the Hebrew Bible), a strategic hill upon which armed guards could protect (or conscript) valuables being transported along a majo…

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Fear of a Catholic Ghetto

…ented from holding public office. In the mid-nineteenth century, while the number of Catholic hospitals was growing, the Know Nothing party organized around shared fears that Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany were overwhelming the country and acting against white Protestant interests.  So the fear of a Catholic ghetto must be understood in light of a real history of Catholics being marginalized during the very time that their health car…

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On Eve of Sudan Split Clashes Continue

…ing for cover in Nuba Mountain caves, William does not believe that the conflict between Northern and Southern Sudan will end with separation; independence, he says, will just be “ice on the fire.” The current conflicts in Abyei and Kordofan arise over the same fault lines as the civil war: race, religion, and resources. The Arab Muslim government in Khartoum has a long history of violently suppressing liberation movements in Central, Western, and…

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National Association of Evangelicals Supports Immigration Reform, But Elsewhere Discord Reigns

…many immigrants who are suffering under our current immigration system’s inflexible and categorical laws with no allowance for individual circumstances. I believe that my faith calls me to work to change those laws, stop unjust deportations, give those worthy would-be Americans a chance. Those realities simply don’t match the realities seen by the CIS panelists. They call my version naïve; I think their version is too often just plain mean. Yet we…

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House GOP Hires Lawyer to Prevent Federal Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage

…gths, and the great expense of a high-power law firm, to try to score some cheap political points on the backs of same-sex couples.” I suppose Boehner can pander to the religious right and continue to defend “traditional” marriage, but I think it’s fair to ask why—when jobless rates continue to hover near 10 percent—which issue may be most important to God: how people arrange their intimate relationships, or how we feed and care for those families…

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The Social Science Animal: Brooks Argues for Emotion over Reason

…But instead of inspiring figures of human potential, they come off more as cheap foils that Brooks is using to market his theories to the wealthy, literate class of policy wonks that he hopes will take his ideas seriously. More, Brooks is no Rousseau. And no novelist. If there is something mildly, warmly inspiring about his theoretical claims, they fall flat when explored through the medium of these sadly hollow characters. Brooks is perhaps best…

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Possible Heir to Dalai Lama Cleared of Corruption Charges

…ing (though achieving it at the expense of refugees and Buddhist monks who fled China at 14 to get an education smacks of bad taste.) The affair has also unsettled the sentiments of those living in India’s predominantly Buddhist Himalayan region, which separates China from India. There were large protests in the capitals of both Ladakh and Sikkim, as well as in the capital Delhi, even though media failed to give much coverage. Western followers of…

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