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“Americans Hate Muslims, Too” (And Other Impediments to U.S. Advocacy for Religious Freedom Abroad)

…aside and quietly told us that he had detected our American accents on the phone, and had given us the room instead of others because “Americans hate Muslims, too.” Still today, when I travel in India, Hindus presupposing my agreement frequently make off-handed and derogatory comments about their Muslim neighbors. For those concerned about the effectiveness of the United States’ advocacy for religious freedom around the world, the perception that…

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When Auschwitz Becomes a Poké Stop

Last week we watched death on our smartphones. We witnessed the light drain out of Philando Castile’s eyes and we knew that the stillness of Alton Sterling’s body after the bullets were fired was that of death. We watched. On smartphones and tablets and laptops and televisions, we watched real people die. As Luvvie Ajayi has written, these images and videos “desensitize us to black death” and numb us to the violence done against black bodies—a po…

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First it Was an Insurrection Flag, Now Supreme Court Justice Alito is Caught Flying Another Far-Right Flag — An ‘Emblem for an Extensive Spiritual Warfare Campaign’

…urge of pickpockets besieging Mom & Pop stores. But who knows? Some people phone a friend to unload about their annoying neighbor, so maybe Mrs. Alito’s way of coping with neighborhood strife is to hoist a flag flown by insurrectionists. Could it be true? Yes. But it is incredibly unlikely—just as unlikely as misogynist-in-chief Sam Alito allowing his wife to decide which flag is flown for days at his house, openly supporting the insurrection. The…

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Under Water: Waiting for the Flood (of Awareness) in Louisiana

…the floods in Louisiana are, in large part, hard-working poor and working-class people. So hard-working, in fact, that many took it upon themselves to rescue friends and strangers from the rising waters, to open their homes to those made homeless, and to volunteer at shelters and places of worship. Some may say that Mother Nature does not discriminate. That may be true, but it’s also true that people of means have a much greater capacity to withst…

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Scolding Those Who Choose Pets But No Children Pope Misses the Rainforest for the Trees

…with cats and dogs—selfish? This is precisely what Pope Francis suggested last week when he told a general audience: “Many couples do not have children because they do not want to, or they have just one – but they have two dogs, two cats… And this denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us, it takes away our humanity… a man or woman who do not develop the sense of fatherhood or motherhood, they are lacking something, something fundamental,…

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But ‘Natural’ is Better, No? ‘How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science’

…dged that we all have to choose our compromises. In the book you explore a number of social domains—diet, birth control, parenting, economics, alternative medicine—where what’s “natural” is considered to be what’s best, and then you unspool them to show that the natural/unnatural divide was never really that coherent in the first place. Did any of your case studies surprise you? One of my favorite examples when I was doing research was the history…

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Culture Wars Masquerading as Social Science: New Survey Illustrates Evangelicals’ Election Year Anxieties

…may not yield as reliable of estimates as probability samples taken over a phone or another method. That is, we tend to be somewhat skeptical of population estimates produced by such data.” Asked what they thought the purpose of the 2020 State of Theology Survey might be, and whether it might be geared toward driving evangelicals to the polls, Whitehead replied, “I do think there is a particular narrative that they are trying to push with this res…

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Thomas Jefferson’s Bible Rejected the Supernatural Jesus in Response to the ‘Stupidity’ of Those Who Deified Him

…Museum of American History as well as a prolific writer who has written a number of pieces for RD. Gordon Haber spoke to Manseau by phone. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Tell us about the Jefferson Bible. What is it? Why did he do it? Jefferson wanted to distill the Gospels down to core teachings of Jesus as a moral teacher. So he went through copies of the Bible and cut out with a penknife everything that had to do with J…

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For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

…lculation of whose lives are valued. The contrast between the anti-gay backlash in the first years of AIDS and the backlash against people of color evident in both epidemics is “helping me to understand that the original lie of America is this white superiority and all the kinds of supremacy that allows some people to think that other people don’t matter. All of that has become so visible.” There are big differences in the physical and social traj…

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Sean Feucht’s New Year’s Rockin’ Superspreader Revival is a ‘Tepid and Meager’ Effort at Racial Reconciliation

…ymbolically, today, Christianity has lost its hegemony [in America]. It’s classic for American Christians to say ‘Now we need a revival,’ in an effort to purify the nation so it can have that special covenantal relationship with God.” This sort of Christian Nationalism also seems to be a driving force for Feucht and his “Revival or bust” attitude, one that could carry his movement past the end of the pandemic and into a post-Trump world. That atti…

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