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NOM Claims Victimhood for the Holidays

…ir intolerance of me. For those family members, ignoring them is often the best thing to do. Leave the room when they start in on you. (I told my therapist I thought this was rude, but she reminded me that if I told a family member that I didn’t want to have this conversation and they persisted, it was really the obnoxious family member who was rude and I had every right to walk away after that.) Perhaps the best thing to do this holiday season—if…

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Papal Profanity: The Vatican’s Pagan Museum

…nd repatriation are the new buzzwords in American museums, and some of our best museums (the Getty, the Metropolitan, the Cleveland Museum, the Princeton Museum) were recently forced to send a lot of Greek works of art back, not to Greece, but to Rome. It’s all a bit bewildering, but fascinating at the same time.   Which leads me to a second project, a book about the Greek island of Crete where I excavated for five years. I want to use Cretan hist…

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State of the Union Stuck in that Olde-Time Semi-Niebuhrianism

…the House chamber were any judge, the heart of the matter is that, in the best Niebuhrian “realist” fashion, a “contentious and frustrating and messy democracy” is proving its superiority to every other nation with its domestic “civility,” while at the same time sending its military forces to fend off a shadowy and (let’s be honest now) apparently rather ineffectual foreign threat.  Whether the president truly believes his Niebuhrian rhetoric no…

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Why Antisemitism is an Insufficient (and Risky) Explanation for Hamas’s October 7 Attack on Israel

…sm as an impulsive, populist, misdirected explosion of anger from below is best encapsulated, as noted above, in the pogrom. Across Jewish history, Jews have often been the scapegoat for the economic disenfranchisement of the mass classes, who have their righteous anger projected onto an imagined picture of “the Jew.” Pogroms are a part of our ancestral memory, memorialized in everything from folklore to liturgies, and are archetypal for how we un…

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Quantum Theology: Our Spooky Interconnectedness

…er words, that in the worst case, theology and science were at war. In the best case, I assumed, they had a rather awkward relationship—something like bad first date. And then I read Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (Routledge, 2003). What occurred was nothing short of a paradigm shift. What Keller was up to was beyond me—in the very best way. She wasn’t doing apologetics (defending theology from its outside objectors)….

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Challenge to ‘un-Africanness’ of homosexuality; LGBT Catholics in Africa face church cooperation with persecution; lesbian cartoon project debuts in bangladesh under shadow of violence; Global LGBT Recap

…ition: Mr. Abbott, a conservative leader who is a polarizing figure at the best of times, is doing badly in the polls, two years after taking office. His position on same-sex marriage is only one factor, but it is one that analysts say goes to the core of his political vulnerability. “His issue is his inability to reach out beyond a core group of conservative voters,” said Jessica Elgood, a director at the polling firm Ipsos, who added that he had…

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New Spencer Book Denies Existence of Muhammad

…Muhammad knew that people were making things up and created checks and the best methodology that they could at the time to stop it. Modern scholars are revisiting the existing corpus with new tools and methods.  Why a famous mosque inscription may refer not to Muhammad but, astonishingly, to Jesus. Stumped by this one. No idea what it refers to. How the oldest records referring to a man named Muhammad bear little resemblance to the now-standard Is…

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Hearts and (Versus?) Minds: Bachmann’s Ultrasound Bill

…ng to Bachmann, the goal here is to make sure that the woman has “the very best information with which to make that decision.” (Good thing she’s still about leaving the decision up to the woman, because otherwise she might be disheartened by evidence suggesting that viewing an ultrasound makes little difference in the outcome of that decision.) Yes, that’s the line on ultrasound bills. They give women some sort of necessary information. But why do…

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To Get Through This Time We’ll Have to Shred the ‘Racial Contract’ and Choose Solidarity Over Sacrifice

…ers to reopen the economy. Our ugly history of social Darwinism is perhaps best exemplified—or revealed—by the Tennessee protester who famously brandished a sign reading, “Sacrifice the weak, Re-open TN.” The now former chairperson of the planning commission in Antioch, California suggested letting the virus run its course to kill the weak, elderly and homeless in order to relieve health care and Social Security costs. These perspectives are not o…

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Is Bill Barr’s Belief in a Powerful President Actually Religious? A ‘High Papal’ Fable

…be just an intelligent and readable history of Christianity—Tom Holland’s best-selling Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (2019). Far from being a ‘plain vanilla’ history of Christianity, I would argue that Holland, like Barr, offers a ‘high papal’ vision of the way things have been and should be. In his latest book Tom Holland serves up an example of a literature affirming Europe’s ‘deep Christianity,’ though tilted very muc…

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