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Alums Speak Out Against Anti-Gay Christian College

…e ban is not on being gay but on the “practice”—just as there’s a ban on sex between unmarried straight students. In Higa’s 22 years at Westmont, she said, the school has not expelled anyone for being gay. A straight, unmarried couple left, she said, after they refused to live apart: “They understood what they had agreed to and they dropped out.” Alum Melissa Durkee said it’s hard to know what the school might consider “practice.” “Is ‘homosexual…

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Record Number of Stealth Creationism Bills Introduced in 2011

…wmakers from whining that science is mean to them. As NCSE points out, an example of this supposed persecution was exemplified in Ben Stein’s cynical piece of schlock Expelled. (My review of the movie is here.)   In addition to Texas, another anti-evolution bill was also introduced this month in Florida. HB 1854 would require “a critical analysis” of the teaching of evolution in public schools. The bill is little different from legislation current…

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Soccer and the Sublime in the Shadow of Apartheid

…further death threats, back-door deals, and fundamental greed, all at the expense of locals. Which brings us to the paradox of it all. The tournament starts today. For good or ill, the tournament’s eminence has vanquished concerns of these less noble attributes, even for the locals of Nelspruit. The game will unify people, and mollify hardship for the present. It will not end it, but it provides a respite. Some might call it tragic delusion—opiate…

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In Crisis, Catholic Church Plays ‘The Jew’

…nd, to take it a step further, from a refusal to consider that the robust expression of adult sexuality might be good for the soul). Beyond that, there is the fact that the Catholic Church itself is one of the all-time leading instigators and purveyors of anti-Jewish sentiment, though this circumstance has been blessedly altered over the past half century. But, again in the words of my congregant, himself a passionate participant in Catholic-Jewis…

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Tennessee Anti-Evolution Update

…on proposed by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, an organization that promotes intelligent design. David Fowler, head of the conservative Christian Family Action Council of Tennessee, which is affiliated with Focus on the Family, and is one of the bill’s primary lobbyists. In defending the bill’s language, he has tried to draw on comparisons to the famous Scopes monkey trial that took place 86 years ago in his state. “…[T]oday’s evolutionary…

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Angels & Demons: America’s Preeminent Pop Theologian Takes on Religion and Science

…lileo’s, in fact), he couldn’t bear that it would fund the Genesis-making experiments at CERN. When science explains away the hand of God, he believes, religion will lose its relevance. People will doom themselves to spiritless squalor. Ewan McGregor portrays, to my knowledge, the first action-movie villain driven to his diabolical acts by an addiction to intelligent design theory. Natural Enemies There aren’t a lot of religion-and-science movies,…

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Dispatches from the Beltway: Beyond the Graying and Greening Religious Right

…oxy for these left-center-right divisions. The Pew social conservatism index reveals some deep chasms between the evangelical left/center and right. On social issues, the differences are most pronounced on the issues of stem cell research, abortion, and the morning after pill. A majority of left/center evangelicals support stem-cell research, legalized abortion, and access to the morning after pill without a prescription. There is a remarkable 50-…

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Gandhi, his Grandson, Israel, and the Jews

…ews of Germany were persecuted—but where would their persecution lead? To exile? Or to extermination? Buber’s letter shows both his respect for Gandhi’s thought and his concern for making distinctions between the Jewish situation and that of Indians in South Africa and India. Buber addresses the Mahatma respectfully: I have been very slow in writing this letter to you, Mahatma. I made repeated pauses—sometimes days elapsed between short paragraphs…

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Conservative Christian Book on Obama’s Faith

…ago where months before I spent a good deal of time trying to understand. Explaining is not defending except for those who prefer a life of uninformed hate.” He also disagreed with Smith that he “had written a pro-Obama book that would draw evangelicals away from McCain.” And he pleads with the right-wing Christian readership that has pre-judged his book to remember that “being a Christian and a conservative is not tantamount to having a brain byp…

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Margaret Cho: God Bless You, F***ing F***ers 

…dy for some serious War on Culture…er…culture war. So there’s Christian as code-word for ‘evangelical.’ Like when Republican politicians say it. And there’s Christian meaning Protestant, as opposed to Catholic. And there’s Christian the way a missionary might mean it, (as opposed to heathen?). And there are those “anonymous Christians,” or involuntary Christians…was that Rahner who devised that category? Does anyone outside of seminary or grad sch…

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