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The New Christianity: What the Mainstream Media Has Missed

…hosts) interviewed me. On the Internet, Mark Karlin of Buzzflash strongly promoted our work, accurately dubbing Palin a ‘Manchurian candidate.’ New York Times religion reporter Laurie Goodstein interviewed us at considerable length and quoted me in her NYT story on Palin. She was one of the few journalists assigned to the beat (Garance Burke, writing for the Associated Press, also stood out) who got it. Her story, without actually naming the New

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Breaking Up With Marilynne Robinson Over Her Refusal to Acknowledge the Dark Side of Puritanism

…apartheid South Africa, where a notoriously brutal regime that, just like New England, saw itself as a “New Israel,” survived until 1990. This is the darker side of Calvinism that Robinson has seldom if ever discussed, and it would really help her case for Calvinist “liberality” if she could also acknowledge the shadow side. For example, she might consider asking the Irish what they think of Oliver Cromwell’s Christian charity. To my mind it’s Mi…

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Churches Can No Longer Hide the Truth: Daniel Dennett on the New Transparency

…ious beliefs. You also find symmetry between fundamentalist Christians and New Atheists: both think that truth claims need to be taken very seriously. How do you respond to the accusation that there is a fundamentalism to New Atheism, where science is often treated as an absolutist metaphysics? Well, absolutism is almost always a mild term of abuse. Nobody champions absolutism. Whenever anybody is called an absolutist it’s usually meant in critici…

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How Men’s Rights Activists Are Finding Unlikely Allies in New Atheism: #MeToo, the Manosphere, and the “Church of Feminism”

…or New Atheism, the enemy is irrationality itself. But as the two groups’ memberships and rhetoric coalesce, New Atheism increasingly ends up firing at the same targets as blatant misogynists. As #MeToo continues to promote conversations about gender dynamics and rights, New Atheists might find that it’s time to be clear about their ideological commitments—or else have those commitments decided for them by their base….

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Don’t Be Tooken In by Kimmy Schmidt‘s Cult

…chen’s trust. This show deserves a smart and skeptical audience. Cheer for Kimmy when she insists we “stand up and say, ‘We’re different. We’re the strong ones, and you can’t break us!’” Our unabashed love for Tina Fey might tempt us to give her a pass here—surely one more depiction of new religions as crazy and abusive can’t be that bad. But we cannot underestimate how little Americans actually know about new religions, or how much damage misconc…

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The New “Values Voters” Mantra

…ontend, are not granted by either document, only recognized in them; these rights exist only because they were granted by God.  That “endowed by the Creator” argument has been made repeatedly by Republican politicians in speeches lately, including Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich. That’s the new “values voters” rhetoric: government is a tyrant, disobedient to God. Sure, all the anti-gay, anti-abortion, and anti-secularism stuff i…

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Hitching a Freedom Ride: Gay Ain’t the New Black…

…or religion. It’s a matter of rights. Charles E. Cobb, an African-American journalist and author who served as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi between 1962-67 seems to have the right perspective. While recently promoting his new book On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail he offered his thoughtful opinion. “Gay marriage should be treated as any other civil right,” h…

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Milquetoast Liberal Religion Won’t Challenge Conservative Values: A History Lesson

…65% of its courthouses, city halls, and sewage-disposal plants; 35% of its new public-health facilities; 10% of all of new roads, bridges, tunnels and subways, in addition to large dams, airports and recreational facilities. The first effort to provide affordable housing for the working poor was undertaken by the PWA. The second approach was to establish public employment programs for needy workers in which the government itself acted as the emplo…

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How Indiana’s New RFRA Expands the Federal RFRA

…k: Compare Indiana’s newly minted RFRA to the one assessed by the court in New Mexico. The Indiana RFRA departs from New Mexico’s RFRA and the federal RFRA—on which many other state laws are modeled. How? Indiana’s RFRA expressly provides that a person can assert a “claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.” This new statutory language…

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When Religion Goes Missing in the Modern Museum

…9th century, then archaeology played a major role in the construction of a new image of the new-old Greek nation. The Parthenon itself had, by then, been many things. The Byzantines had turned it into a church, the Church of Holy Wisdom. The Franks turned it into a fortress, replete with a new defensive tower. The Turks turned it into a mosque, then later used it as a powder magazine. The Venetian Count Morosoni, knowing this, lobbed a shell into…

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