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Conversion Story #643 (not a real number)

These days, when ever you say you are Muslim by choice, you get people asking about your conversion. Mostly they want to know why. This curiosity comes equally from those who are already Muslim and those who are not. I used to tell the same basic steps—although I hardly think my own individual door lights up any bulbs of excitement. Maybe because no lightbulbs went off for me either. I was a seeker. I was raised in a loving Christian environment…

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The Benedict Opt-Out: Why Christian Self-Isolation Won’t Work

…n will help parents to keep their children faithful. Given the statistical number of Nones among Millennials and Gen X and the seemingly unpreventable increase in those numbers, these children, like Emily, or the children of many homeschooling parents, will eventually encounter peers who are not religiously affiliated. Given the way technology works, they will also inevitably find a way to expose themselves to popular culture. And the question rem…

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New Poll Reveals a Paradox in Evangelical Support for Donald Trump

…te boundary. Before secular government enthusiasts get too excited by this number I would point out that, for a fair number of evangelicals, the worry is that the state will interfere with the church, not the other way around. Similarly, a little more than one in four White evangelicals said the federal government should declare Christianity the official religion of the United States. Far more (61%) said that Christianity should not be the officia…

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Sharing Many of the Same Flaws as its Subject ‘The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill’ Podcast Puts Blame Anywhere But Where It Belongs

…ys Mark was the first Internet age megachurch celebrity pastor and leading number one podcasts, number one sermon downloads, those kinds of things. So what that did is, elevated Mark to the stratosphere so quickly, whereas you might think…typically they may take 20-30 years of faithful ministry, but the Internet just propelled things with such rapidity, and the Internet only sees how you speak, that’s all the Internet is, it’s all about verbal art…

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Are Muslims Nuts?

…our own complexity, when we reject attempts to homogenize and essentialize the world, we’ll begin to see that there is a way for sanity to triumph over insanity….

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Who’s Accusing Who of Mormon-Baiting?

…t Coke and a dozen pink-frosted sugar cookies that there is no anti-Mormon phonebanking script in use by Catholics for Obama. Anywhere. Is anti-Mormonism real? Yes. But even if one poorly-trained rogue phonebanker veered off script into an anti-Mormon ad lib, it does not make for a concerted anti-Mormon effort.  (Leave that to orthographically challenged “Heaven is Easy” ministry in Florida.) May cool heads prevail as the race heats up in its fina…

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Suicide Leads to Calls for Improved Treatment of LGBT Mormons

…itute a threat to our religious freedom. But do any of these serve the thousands upon thousands of young Mormons who are coming to terms with their attraction to people of the same sex? Do any of these prepare non-gay Mormons to respond to gay sons and daughters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, or fellow Latter-day Saints? How does it feel to be the LDS parents of a gay child in a culture where unthinking people feel they have divine sanc…

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The ‘Unified Reich’ Scandal is a Feature Not a Bug of Trump’s Brand of American Fascism

…to have to staff that administration. And in particular if you remove thousands, if not tens of thousands of career civil servants, somebody needs to fill those positions. And I think the first Trump administration did show pretty persuasively that a career national security official, a career neoconservative is not going to be as reliable in implementing, you know, Trump’s agenda either domestically or in foreign policy. And, you know, the Nazis…

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First it Was an Insurrection Flag, Now Supreme Court Justice Alito is Caught Flying Another Far-Right Flag — An ‘Emblem for an Extensive Spiritual Warfare Campaign’

…y proposal. It’s also pretty well known that he seems to be a deeply unpleasant person—something that can be confidently deduced from his snarky opinions as a judge on the Highest Court of the land; the way he behaves during oral arguments; and let’s be honest, his behavior during most of his public appearances where he performs a mightily embittered form of victimization. All in all, we’ve long known Sam Alito is as right-wing as the day is long….

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‘The Quiet Damage’ Details the Heartbreaking Effect of QAnon on Five American Families — But Critical Questions Linger

…f this book. It’s based on “hundreds of hours” of interviews in person, by phone, and online over three years. The pacing is fine, and by chapter 10 it becomes truly heartbreaking. Reading about people ruining their lives and the lives of their loved ones, over and again, is not a light read. In that sense it resembles an addiction memoir. This resemblance is made explicit in the afterword in which Cook argues that underneath the disinformation cr…

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