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There’s No Business Like the Bible Business: 200 Years of the ABS

…appear through this book, sometimes with numbing frequency and volume. Thousands of Bibles in the early years of the ABS; tens of thousands some decades later; millions and millions through the course of the twentieth century. The numbers document the stunning capacity of the ABS to flood the zone with Scriptures. Through the book, the ABS accomplished exactly that on the western frontier in the early nineteenth century, Union soldiers’ camps duri…

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“Hey You! Anti-Semite!”: A Jewish Krewe does Mardi Gras

…rganizations like the ADL continue to monitor self-declared anti-Semitism, numbers are down in the long term. The advance of social acceptance of Jews into American culture has perhaps been aided by the ability and willingness of many American Jews to blend in. No one has to know you are Jewish if you Anglify your last name, stop speaking Yiddish, stop wearing distinctive clothing, drop dietary regulations, pay plastic surgeons to re-shape your pr…

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A Truly Fearless Human Being: Rev. Howard Moody, 1921-2012

…dimension of empathy. Perhaps the best tribute to him came from one of our number who famously and irreverently said: “I put my trust in Howard Moody and God, in that order.” We are forever grateful for this good man. ____________ Editor’s Note: As a generalist, an editor frequently must guide and shape work on unfamiliar topics. Having heard only that Rev. Moody was one of those “hip, old preachers in the Village,” I set out to do the obligatory…

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How To Control Your Ungodly Urges… On a Budget!

…As almost everyone knows, in relation to the ongoing birth control battle, Sandra Fluke gave congressional testimony about Georgetown law students’ needs for insurance coverage for oral contraceptives, and some on the right wing responded by … Wait. Guys, you might want to be sitting down, because I’m about to describe a kind of rhetorical genius so intense the words might singe your retinas with their brilliance. (pauses while the readership of R…

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With Methodist LGBTQ Vote and GOP Support for Trump, White Protestantism Has Hit Bottom

…ose reading of Scripture is cramped, at best. Seen in this context, it’s a cheap dodge for liberals within the UMC to blame churches and delegates from the Global South for the vote to retain (and even heighten) the denomination’s ban on all things queer. Yes, the UMC does have a much heavier Global South representation in its governance than any of the other “sisters”; fully 41% of the delegates in St. Louis represented churches outside of the Un…

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News Flash: Buddhist-Majority Countries Just as Complicated as Muslim-Majority

…under not good, and the country’s most famous democratic personality, Ang San Suu Kyi, has been disturbingly quiet, preferring not to speak out; whatever her reasons may be, her silence is as they say deafening. In addition to the country’s long history of ethnic and sectarian conflict, the plight of its Muslim population continues to worsen, with evidence of human trafficking of Burmese Muslim refugees now surfacing. The violence threatens to sp…

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Buddhism And Politics in Myanmar: An Author Interview

…mese monk asked this American to talk with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi about vipassana (insight) meditation, as she had recently started to rediscover this part of her heritage. This was a time of incredible intellectual ferment for her—you can see it in some of her writings and speeches of the period—when she was attempting to weave together Buddhism, democracy, rights, etc. Hearing about these discussions fascinated me, and while the retreat was sort o…

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Death Couture: Not For Halloween Only

…gh the agency of her narco-devotees. Local Religion, Globalization, and La Santa Muerte Although the origins of La Santa Muerte developed locally and unrelated to criminality, there is no doubt that the devotion is changing. Like language, symbols as objects of devotion are constantly in flux. Images that once helped to ease the fear of death have now come to embody that fear on both sides of the border. As savvy marketers, drug cartels have appro…

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Trump’s Pathological Devotion to Border Walls Isn’t Political, It’s Theological

…in 250,000—some of whom are going to have problems, big problems—is just insane. We have to be insane. Terrible,” he said at a rally in Beaumont. It was noted that the 250,000 number was seemingly pulled from thin air, a ghastly specter of invasion at a scale larger than most of our cities. There were later comments about poisonous Skittles made by one of his idiotic children. *** Consider the travel ban clearly targeting Muslim-majority countries…

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