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Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse

…homes and factories with new supplies of electric power that would be “too cheap to meter.” In 1957 Walt Disney even released a movie titled Our Friend, the Atom. Looking back now, it’s quite easy to see why the happy talk from Ike and Walt failed to quell our nuclear nightmares. In somewhat the same way that climate change denialism functions today, the Atoms for Peace campaign merely divided public opinion, allowing some to sleep easy and the mo…

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

…usly espoused this idea that contraceptives are so widely available and so cheap that the mandate was unnecessary. He said “all you have to do is walk into a 7-Eleven or any shop on any street in America and have access to them.” Opponents of the mandate have consistently belittled the idea that contraceptives are a significant health care cost for women despite the fact that, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, birth control comprises betw…

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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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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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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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House GOP Hires Lawyer to Prevent Federal Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage

…gths, and the great expense of a high-power law firm, to try to score some cheap political points on the backs of same-sex couples.” I suppose Boehner can pander to the religious right and continue to defend “traditional” marriage, but I think it’s fair to ask why—when jobless rates continue to hover near 10 percent—which issue may be most important to God: how people arrange their intimate relationships, or how we feed and care for those families…

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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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How to Choose a Tour Company for Your Hajj

…nts than their quota allows. Most Muslim countries have a quota; a limited number of hajjis permitted from that country in any one year. This number is set by hajj authorities in Saudi Arabia, because, in all fairness, there has to be a cap on how many Muslims converge on the place. Right now, it stands at around 3 million! Countries with large populations of Muslims have many more applicants than their allotted number of pilgrims. This means you…

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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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