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Reporting from Paris: A Prayer for Polluters

…us confess we are addicted to fossil fuels and will use some to go to work today or to cook our food today or to warm our homes today, it is a good day to pray. Like that drink you can’t stop drinking, we are stuck in an addictive pattern. We are morally compromised, to put it mildly. Yesterday it looked like 1.5° C (about 3°F) was going to be the direction for COP21’s final objective (“1.5 and stay alive,” goes the slogan) or at the very least “l…

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TED-Evangelism Harkens Back to a Forgotten 19th-Century Tradition

…but what we have here, mostly, is a particular aesthetic (“The TED talk is today a sentimental form,” Nathan Heller writes in The New Yorker). Wright describes this aesthetic in frankly spiritual terms. TED talks, he told me, are in keeping with “a kind of civic religion of aspiration and self-reliance and communal progress.” When I brought up this hope-and-progress energy with Vanderbilt historian Paul Stob, a scholar of intellectual culture, he…

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Global LGBT Recap: Francis’s First Year; Homophobia and Development; African Activists Push Back

…ures said donors should be guided by in-country LGBT movements. “In Uganda today, in Nigeria today, you will find [they are] well organized. They are fighting back, and this should be our reference point,” he said. More than 20 African civil society groups called on the African Union to resist the spread of anti-gay laws like those in Uganda and Nigeria: As African civil society organisations whose members live and work to improve the lives of all…

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Israel Votes to Limit Sheldon Adelson

…he bill is aimed at limiting the free distribution of Israel Hayom (Israel Today), the free newspaper owned by American casino magnate and Republican super-funder Sheldon Adelson. The same Sheldon Adelson who, at the inaugural meeting of the Israeli American Council in Washington on Sunday, said, “I don’t like journalism.” Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer explains the anti-Adelson bill that advanced today: The law, proposed by MK Eitan Cabel (Knesset) and…

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American Jews: From Holocaust to New Age Hasidism?

…emporary world? Those who want to ground Jewish identity in the reality of today’s antisemitism abroad must deal with the disconnect between that antisemitism and the reality of Jews who are truly at home in America today. Even the contemporary memorialization of the Holocaust rests on a strange rhetorical simultaneity of the uniqueness of Jewish victimization alongside a universalism implicit in the commitment to human rights that flows out of Ho…

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A Response to the Newsweek flap: Passages vs. Principles

…of the Southern Baptist Convention). I doubt very much that any Christian today would consider slavery a “live issue”, but it was not always so. What many today may not be aware of is that the supporters of slavery had in their favor those specific texts in the Bible that address the subject. They engaged in careful exegesis of the passages, which offered legislation regarding the practice rather than prohibiting it. Turning to the New Testament,…

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Solidarity Through Veiling? Backlash Has Been “Personal, Fierce and Vile…”

…ent in a country like Egypt was rare and a far cry from the pandemic it is today with a <90% hijab rate among Muslims. People who know women from these cultures today understand the tremendous pressure all Muslim women can be under to veil. The pressure can be so severe that one does have to problematize notions of “choice” in some contexts. – In view of this last point: something happened to change these societies. Leila Ahmed’s A Quiet Revolutio…

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International “Religious Freedom” Agenda Will Only Embolden ISIS

…vocacy is considerably more complex than is suggested by such accounts. To promote religious rights is to promote a particular mode of governing social diversity that implicates religion in complex and variable ways, depending on the context. Legal and political advocacy for religious freedom tends to mask other contributors to social tension and conflict, amplify and entrench the religious divisions it seeks to manage, and force political authori…

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The Critiques of Evangelical Writers Opposing Christian Nationalism Fail to Recognize Evangelicalism’s Troubling History

…ee other causes. First, the birth rate declined rapidly as the ecumenicals promoted contraception and encouraged the entry of women into the workforce. Evangelical parents had scads of children, more even than Catholic parents during the baby boom and the decades following. Second, and yet more important, millions of young people left their parents’s church, having become involved in secular communities promoted by the social movements of the 1960…

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‘Religious Liberty’ and the Origins of the Evangelical Persecution Complex

…ed of Hargis: “any comment short of adulation is considered a smear . . .” Today’s conservative evangelicals see any straying from what they consider God’s plan for America as a kind of national apostasy—the liberty of Bible believers was and is under threat. In this fear they bear the imprint of Hargis and his contemporaries. In January of 1963, for example, the Christian Crusade organized an anti-Communist rally in Boston. With vocal opposition…

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