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The New Disciples: Report from South Carolina

By Sarah Posner

…rday, that conventional story was on view: voters for whom abortion is the number one motivating issue, trying to send that message to both candidates and observers. There, on the statehouse steps, another kind of conservative evangelicalism was on view: that of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar of 19 Kids and Counting fame, who have endorsed Santorum. That these icons of the contraception-eschewing wing of evangelicalism marched behind the Knights of C…

The Problem with Moral Nuance on Abortion for Democrats

By Patricia Miller

…d office recently noted in Politico, the Obama administration spent an enormous amount of time on fact-finding and listening sessions with pro-choice and pro-life groups to come up with a viable, bipartisan strategy to reduce the need for abortions: But zero-sum politics won. Anti-abortion groups, most of which might as well be legally incorporated into the Republican Party, did not want to give a pro-abortion rights president the victory of leadi…

The GOP’s Race to the
Dark Ages

By Sarah Posner

…s, too, is a matter of religious conscience, because they want no taxpayer money going to Planned Parenthood just because it does perform abortions, even if the money doesn’t directly fund them. After the Mississippi personhood measure failed, anti-choice fans of an “incrementalist” approach cheered. They fear a personhood measure would be a faulty challenge to Roe should one reach the Supreme Court, damaging their efforts to end legal abortion. T…

Tattoos, Cremation, Personal Spirituality: The Jewish World in Transformation

By Dana Evan Kaplan

…their community thinks of those particular ideas. This has allowed Jews to move in a number of different directions, including seemingly contradictory ones. I found some of these contradictory impulses fascinating. For example, there have been a lot more young Jewish people getting tattoos, including many who choose Jewish symbols or Hebrew letters. Now of course the halacha prohibits getting a tattoo, and in earlier generations, a Jew who got a t…

Bad Faith: The Catholic Hierarchy’s Pointless Campaign Against LGBT Rights

By Casey and Mary Ellen Lopata

…f our Catholic faith but because of it. We learned in childhood that Jesus moved freely among the outcast and the marginalized, that he warned his followers to judge not lest they be judged, and that he taught that our neighbor was not the priest who passed the beaten traveller on the other side of the road to avoid ritual impurity, but the hated Samaritan who bound up his wounds, and paid for his care. We learned later that the Church’s teachings…

Quantum Theology: Our Spooky Interconnectedness

By Beatrice Marovich

…nnected particles, no matter how far away they are. So, rather than become more and more indifferent to one another the further away they are, these particles will forever respond to each other instantaneously as though you are effecting both of them in the same way, at the same moment. They’re entangled? Right. It looks like, from a certain point of view, nothing is separate from anything at all. As the novelist Jeanette Winterson puts it, in her…

Bachmann Staffer Likens
Rick Perry to King Saul and Bachmann to anointed
King David

By Warren Throckmorton

…placed His blessing on King David. Here is the Waldron comment in full: The three-part video interview of Waldron on the Herman and Sharron Bailey Show talking about his time in prison in Uganda is up at YouTube. As of this morning, Waldron’s websites, Peterewaldron.com (Google cache here) and Theultimatepricemovie.com (Google cache) have been taken down. Waldron’s current project, “Christians Restoring America’s Greatness,” can be viewed here….

The Revolujah! Will Be Performed: Reverend Billy’s Reality Joke

By Nathan Schneider

…praises the look shared by a couple in the marriage rite that is, to him, more real and more powerful than anything marketers can design. He writes, “Consumerism has taken all the language of freedom from history, and emptied those words of meaning by using them to sell products, from breath mints to war.” Billy wants to put meaning back into those words, back into ideas of freedom and community. His strategies for exposing their current bankrupt…

In 2012 Bishops Join Fight to Repackage Discrimination as ‘Religious Freedom’

By Sarah Posner

…articularly during tough economic times. In Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, and most recently in Illinois, Catholic Charities has shut down its adoption services entirely rather face the mere possibility of placing children with same-sex couples. The contraceptive co-pay rule, as written, exempts houses of worship. But the Bishops insist that any Catholic institution—including hospitals, colleges, and universities that employ Catholics an…

2011’s Best Books—
Or Just a Great Reading List

By Haroon Moghul

…ption in some cases, for prison has systemically failed. Our readers might most enjoy Moskos’ delving into the religious origins of much of our contemporary sense of punishment and justice. Beyond that, all must read this if only for its succinctly terrifying descriptions of a massive prison industry that sees America incarcerate more people, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of its population, than almost any other country in the world…