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LDS Church Issues New Statement on Immigration

…iscourse” by the public. “Finding a successful resolution will require the best thinking and goodwill of all across the political spectrum, the highest levels of statesmanship, and the strongest desire to do what is best for all of God’s children,” Church leaders said. Elected officials and Latino activists have asked the Church to take a more public stance on immigration in part because the immigration debate has been most heated in western state…

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A Peek Inside the ‘Onion’ of Scientology

…lebook. They are recruited into the Church to serve two functions: They’re promotional tools, and they fund the Church. The rules are bent for them. In the New Yorker piece on Paul Haggis, he tells this great story about how he always had doubts about Scientology and [whether] it worked—notably, once he got to the higher levels. He would talk to his auditor about them, and the auditor would allow it. That does not happen if you’re not a celebrity…

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The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

…t.” It’s clear in the song that Pigpen’s search for a viable number is, at best, a futile proposition. Still he dials the telephone operator to try find that lost landline. Problem is, he’s not even sure which direction she went. “I think she’s somewhere down south, down about Baton Rouge,” Pigpen begins, but then changes his mind. “She could be hangin’ round the steel mill, working in a house of blue lights, riding a getaway bus out of Portland.”…

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7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

…d to train all people to do. “YOU CAN DO THIS.” Elaine Howard Ecklund: The best mentor is one who is thinking about gender and equality. Robert Wuthnow, a mentor of mine at Princeton, is a great mentor of women who have done extremely well. And you need more than a formal mentor. Any marginalized group needs a bit of initial encouragement to stay on the path, and that can come from any kind of personal relationship. An advisor gives intellectual s…

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Confronting the Rise in Conspiracy Thinking … With Wisdom Literature

…use, last, not everything is under our control. Walter Brueggemann says it best: “In spite of our best planning, there is an inscrutable mystery about our experience which we cannot master or manipulate.” That includes the mystery of suffering, as Job discovered. Adherents of conspiracy theories and other kinds of foolishness often ascribe far too much power and control to the leading figures of their narratives. It’s a primitive way of thinking:…

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When Religion Becomes a Trap Rather Than a Safety Net

…divorce.” What sorts of beliefs and fears compelled her to try to make the best of what she knew was a terrible situation? How did she perceive what was supposed to be a loving, empowering religion as one that did not allow her to admit or correct mistakes? Everybody—including my dad’s mom, who my mother was close to at the time—told her, “Don’t do this. Don’t marry him.” And Mom said, “No, I’m marrying him.” I think as much as anything she was as…

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Updated with Response: The Black Church is Dead—Long Live the Black Church

…d to maintain a posture of resistance to the American status quo. At their best, to borrow from Cornel West, they too are often “progressive yet co-opted.” This simply means to recognize that black Christians are a part and parcel of, as David Wills has long written, the Protestant establishment. Yet even this view of black churches says little about what is religious in the discussion. We might ask, what distinguishes “post-black church” rhetoric…

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Religion, Morality, and the Death of the American Soap Opera

…from early on the soap had a frivolous, ridiculous aesthetic reputation at best, and was considered an outright poisonous influence at worst. During the Second World War, at least one psychiatrist worried that radio soaps were undermining the war morale, distracting women with addictive stories that promoted destructive values. To label something a “soap opera” today still implies that what you are describing involves immature behavior, improbable…

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“The Camp Is a Ceremony”: A Report From Standing Rock

…les, are banned. Rather, the camp is a ceremony, a call to bring forth the best in each of us, and to act accordingly. We are encouraged to live our entire lives as ceremony by one of the elders, in a mode that reminds me of the sacramental life—all of life and all of creation as a sacrament. And that means moderation in our participation of the dynamics that enable the Black Snake of Hopi prophecy. From what I could gather the Black Snake is both…

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Meet The Liberal Tea Partiers

…tax, just something that makes it simpler on families,” he said. “Money is best in the hands of families, and they know how best to spend it on for their children.” “Helping out the poor, that’s certainly something that the Bible tells you to do, but it doesn’t tell you to turn to the tax collectors to help the poor. It’s more to turn to yourselves to help the poor… We don’t believe it’s the role of the federal government to find an answer, a one-…

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