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Old Testament ‘Bad,’ New Testament ‘Good’: A Dangerous (and Mistaken) Assumption

…d Testament revenge,” from TV’s Hannibal. Where does this routine division between “Old Testament” harshness and “New Testament” sweetness come from? In my view, it comes from the widespread but mistaken idea held by Christians (including cultural Christians), that it’s okay to follow St. Paul in drawing a sharp line between the old and oppressive Jewish insistence on “law” and the new Christian era of “grace.” (It goes without saying that the per…

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How an Ancient Story of Renegade Rabbis Caught With Black Market Technology Can Help Us Navigate ChatGPT’s Apocalyptic Aura

…generations would gain access to unprecedented riches of learning, as each new scholar’s wisdom could be passed on to new communities. The Talmud is a heavily edited literary compilation, not a record of a single conversation, so even though it’s presented as a live issue in the story, the very fact that readers are encountering the tale in the Talmud—a work literally made possible by the technology in debate—means that writing down rabbinic teach…

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Undercover at Falwell’s Liberty University, Finding Common Ground

…The Unlikely Disciple, then, comes to seem like the expression of a brave new world and, in it, a new way of writing about religion in this country. It’s not the first book of the kind, but it struck me as the first to fall so comfortably into the time and place. We no longer need (since we are all “we” now) to muckrake and expose the other. Now, the necessary work is understanding, compromise, and shared humanity. These cozy themes have always w…

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Ian Buruma on the Political Excesses of Religion

…at people like to think that there’s a real divide in Western civilization between the New World and the Old World, the U.S. and Europe, and I felt that, on reflection and reading up on it, that actually the divide is much less wide than people think it is. If there is a divide it’s often between Protestant countries and Catholic countries. Or countries such as the U.S. where the established Protestant churches were swept away a long time ago in f…

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Critics of Hasidic Schools Exposé Missed the Point: It Wasn’t Antisemitic or the Product of Secular Bias — It’s a Story of Corruption

…I was reminded of this incident as I read the recent feature in the Sunday New York Times on public funding of hasidic schools in New York City which has raised an enormous backlash on social media and among many American Jews. Accusations of bias, unfairness, and even antisemitism, have floated across social media and Jewish journalism. It seems to me that there are a variety of issues here that have become mashed into one large set of accusation…

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A New Book For Those Who Cling to a “Post-Racial” Christianity

…Racial World Brian Bantum Fortress Press November 2016 I wanted to tell a new story, a theological story that could help people begin to understand how some of the complexities of race and gender are theological problems that are connected to fundamental questions of how God created us and how we account for what seems so broken in the world. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? The most important take-home message is that our…

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The Spirit of January 6th: The Theology of This Seldom Discussed Movement Animates the Growing Threat to U.S. Democracy

…verred, “is predict which individual upon hearing the rhetoric of clear or coded incitement will turn to violence.” Berlet’s essay was titled “Heroes Know Which Villains to Kill: How Coded Rhetoric Incites Scripted Violence.” Indeed, villain identification has been going on for a long time, and NAR leaders are now featuring ancient scripts for modern violence and religious war. We hear it in the form of imprecatory prayers by religious and politic…

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A Pastor Takes on BP in New Orleans

…was crucial as many of its leaders are African Americans who reside in the New Orleans East neighborhood where the Vietnamese community is found. New Orleans East is a historically and predominantly African-American region—the largest in the city—so the prospects of cooperation between the two communities was vital. “Both communities have been willing to be in a relationship; it’s just that [the] process has needed assistance, and that was vision…

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Do Not Arrest the Pope: New Atheists’ Call for the Pope’s Arrest Isn’t Likely to Produce Justice

…cusing him of. More broadly, they want the Pope—a symbol of everything the New Atheists revile—to face a very public and very humiliating defeat. And so, at the instigation of these leaders of the new atheist movement, Robertson and another lawyer, Mark Stephens, are developing a legal case on the basis of which they hope to “ask the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate criminal proceedings against the Pope, launch their own civil action against…

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‘Iconoclash’ of Civilizations: Missives from the Image Wars

…hments to its own images. In his 2002 book, Iconoclash, Latour writes: We knew (I knew!) we had never been modern, but now we are even less so: fragile, frail, threatened; that is, back to normal, back to the anxious and careful stage in which the “others” used to live before being “liberated” from their “absurd beliefs” by our courageous and ambitious modernization. Suddenly, we seem to cling with a new intensity to our idols, to our fetishes, to…

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