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Don’t Buy Alito’s Assurances: Here’s What Happens Next After Roe Falls

…is the appropriate basis for law that triumphs over any individuals’ freedoms, including the right to your own life. Most recognize this as a serious threat to individual freedom, but people on the Christian right tut-tut such concerns pointing to the fact that the decision highlights previous cases such as Lawrence v. Texas (which found sodomy laws unconstitutional), Obergefell (same-sex marriage), Griswold (birth control), and Loving (interracia…

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Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

…ans would be attracted to, appreciate and consider careers in science (the number is decreasing annually). I bet we’d have more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric would fade and, more than likely, movies like Expelled wouldn’t be made in the first place….

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Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

…time that he was having the better evening because of his way with a microphone and his remarkable capacity to modulate his voice (not to mention outing himself as LDS pastor and bishop). But it was Billy Graham’s endorsement, splashed into our faces via an expensive full-page Sunday New York Times ad, that triggered my flat-out recognition: the 94-year-old daddy of all televangelists is laying his bony patriarchal hands upon a fellow preacher wh…

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Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

…Barack Obama. Antisemitism is a serious, real thing. When it is used as a cheap shot—as when pro-Palestinian advocates throw around terms like “Nazi” and “concentration camp”—it is an offense against all those who were murdered over the centuries. Diluting the meaning of the term ‘antisemitism’ is, itself, antisemitic. Second, as I described in a recent post, there is indeed a structural similarity between some of the Occupy movement’s concerns a…

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Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

…st. The sacraments are no longer as central to the lives of Catholics. The number of baptisms has declined from nearly 1 million to just over 700,000, and the number of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the chur…

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Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

…s searched for stowaways, weapons, fireworks, pets, and other forbidden items. Security at the gate was particularly tough this year because of the “tickepocalypse”: for the first time ever, the event sold out. Scalpers hawked tickets for hundreds of dollars over their purchase price and artists who had been working feverishly to finish their projects but had put off purchasing tickets were left out in the cold. It was a different scene in 1997 wh…

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An Open Letter to CEO Jeff Smisek On United Airlines’ Blasphemous Safety Video

…ual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as the video monitors snapped to the image of an engorged sun bursting from be…

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Invited by Allah

…ccurred to me it would be a very easy to make hajj from there. I bought an airline ticket and was in contact with the family of one of my graduate school friends. They would pick me up from the airport and host me during my stay and the days of ritual. Nice plan. So I went to the embassy to get the visa and was denied because (as an American) I needed proof that I was Muslim. How do I prove I have been a practicing Muslim for a decade? I went to t…

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Refusing the Monsters on Maple Street: A First-Person Commentary from the Mass Hysteria at JFK

…atomic warheads pointed at each other. From my point of view, the world seems safer now in some ways, and so much less safe in others. Still, it is we who must make some decisions about how we deal with such a heightened level of anxiety. Authoritarian forces in governments all over the world can stoke our anxiety in order to justify more control. They can fake a coup, botch the response to an attack, and push through “heightened security measures…

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DeSantis is a No-Show, the Right’s ‘Secret Sauce,’ and Final Thoughts on Pray Vote Stand

…he gives us his biblical worldview spin: the person who’s right about the number is the person who knows who made the number and for what purpose. Neither person in the meme can know the truth of whether it’s a six or a nine until the author of the meme tells them. In other words, while there might be many worldviews, only God can truly tell us the truth of the world. Thus the only worldview that’s correct is the one that acknowledges God made th…

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