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Dispatches from the Borderlands: “They Came at Night, Trying to Kill Us!”

…ion, and economic turmoil in their home countries. They have come in large numbers, many of them undocumented, settling among poor South Africans who often resent their presence. While the situation confronting immigrants and poor natives in the United States is not as dire, there are clear signs of simmering tensions around the issue of undocumented immigration, particularly in poor rural communities and around towns that witnessed factory shutdo…

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70th National Prayer Breakfast Made ‘Cosmetic’ Changes, But Biden Delivered the Same Old Tone-Deaf ‘Unity’ Message

…orced to endure this year’s National Prayer Breakfast—the 70th since the unfortunate tradition, which ought to have been dropped as an embarrassing relic of early Cold War excess decades ago, was launched by the authoritarian Christian organization “the Family” in partnership with the Eisenhower Administration in 1953. Every sitting president has attended every year since. As I recently argued elsewhere: Although the breakfast is funded with priva…

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When Being “Christian” Means Supporting Trump: An Argument For Hiding Your Faith

…ued that American Christians were selling out their religious identity for cheap political gain, and that they could help ensure their religious integrity if they took that identity off the market altogether by concealing it in public life. This approach would take seriously Jesus’ advice to pray in secret and to give alms without letting “your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3-6). It also would follow an undercurrent in C…

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Changing the Jewish State and the State of Jews: J Street and the Future of Israel

…. My father always folded over one of the small amounts—not enough to seem cheap, since he was a doctor and a “respected member of the community” (as my mother described him), but certainly not the amount some of his friends and colleagues donated. I didn’t understand it then, but I think my father—born of Lithuanian immigrants, child of the Great Depression, a no-nonsense person who disdained ideologies of all types and never had a bad word to sa…

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The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

…her book is published that way except encyclopedias, dictionaries, and telephone books. You don’t want to read those books, you go to them for authoritative answers and you don’t argue with the dictionary. If you’re playing Scrabble you go to the dictionary to settle the argument. We’ve encouraged people to think about the Bible as this kind of book, a source of authority, the final word, not to be debated. I think that helps people to think that…

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In a Time of Irrational Fear and New Media: The Deadly ‘Dance Plague’ at 500

…ic well-being of your fellow citizens? At a time when a disturbingly large number of people believe in the “QAnon” conspiracy; when “pizzagate” inspired a gunman to raid a pizzeria; where “flat-Earthers” have a growing fan-base; or where people ingest Tide Pods; can we really argue that these aren’t as foolish a bit of mass hysteria as dancing oneself to death? Scottish journalist Charles Mackay contends in his 1841 classic, Extraordinary Popular…

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Can I Get Some Birth Control Pills With That Slushie?: Unpacking the Contraceptive Mandate Rollback

…ed that access. SB: So, is it fair to read this draft rule as the latest effort of the Trump administration to impose conservative Christian morality on the entire country? PM: I don’t think it’s quite fair to read it as an effort of the Trump administration per se. Like so many other things, Trump jumped onto the “Little Sisters” bandwagon when he saw that it was useful to motivate a certain segment of the electorate. It’s probably more accurate…

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Must We Burn Something to Get Attention?: 50 Years After the Catonsville Nine

…e Americans with disabilities being hauled off by Capitol cops, and to the numberless people standing against legal authority that suspects them for the crime of simply being black or Muslim or queer? If we think about Catonsville not just as a curiosity, a minor episode in the history of radical chic, but as a provocation or a template, what do we learn? Must Americans burn something to get attention? Must religious protesters be arrested? Many c…

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Fear of a Catholic Ghetto

…te the backstory there. Haley’s use of the phrase “Catholic ghetto” is not cheap hyperbole, if you consider the history of Catholics in the United States. The US Catholic hospital system grew up in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; largely under the care of women’s religious orders, and largely to serve the poor. (Read about a few of the women who helped build Catholic health care.) The surrounding cultural landscape could be pr…

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Who Is “Sam Bacile?”

…d that the film was intended to be a provocative political statement assailing the religion. He denied being Sam Bacile, the pseudonym for the video’s purportedly Israeli Jewish writer and director, but AP said the cellphone number it called for a telephone interview with Bacile on Tuesday matched Nakoula’s address. —- For more RD coverage of the events in Libya see “Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuses,” by Haroon Moghul — ed….

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