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The Next Islamists: The Wide Green Smudge That’s Changing Our World

…: The Rise of the Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean For Our World (Free Press, 2009) and Ben Simpfendorfer’s intriguing The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009). The Wide Green Smudge Simpfendorfer, fluent in Arabic and Chinese, is Chief China Economist at Royal Bank of Scotland, and has lived throughout the Middle East. He brings a casual language that make…

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State-Licensed Ministers Can’t “Pray Away the Gay,” SCOTUS Affirms

…in all 50 states. In fact, even the California minister who filed suit is free to practice the debunked “therapy”—he just can’t engage minors in the practice, and can’t represent himself as a state-licensed therapist offering that treatment. In his ministerial duties he is free to preach about the power of prayer (or, in some cases, more nefarious tactics) to “rescue” people from the bonds of queerness. But what he can’t do, according to the newl…

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Australian Church Nixes Straight Couple’s Wedding Over Their Marriage Equality Support; and More in Global LGBT Recap

…ences such as radical gay sex education being taught in school, threats to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.” At Crikey, Amy Coopes responds to critics within the LGBT movement who dismiss the marriage equality movement as a form of assimilationism: Some in the Yes camp wish to paint this as, quite simply, a question about amending the Marriage Act to allow two consenting adults to marry, and in a sense, of course, that is true. But as wi…

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The Kids Are All Wrong: Texas Tosses The Enlightenment

…r culture’s own post-Enlightenment understanding of self-determination and free will. Texas does not go back two hundred years to the Framers of the Constitution. It goes back 400 years to the Reformation itself, before democracy was even a modern concept. For a full decade, Texas students will not learn the distinct intellectual role the Enlightenment played in contrast to the Reformation. So much for the concepts of free will and self determinat…

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Bill Gates’ Comments on Covid-19 Vaccine Enflame ‘Mark of the Beast’ Worries in Some Christian Circles

…New Money System 666 (1982), popularized the idea that the Uniform Product Codes (i.e. UPCs or barcodes) were the mark of the beast and would one day be tattooed on human bodies. A trend of ironic barcode tattoos popular in the early twentieth century nods to this idea while commenting on western consumerism. Microchip technology has since replaced the UPC as the most likely candidate for the introduction of a cashless society and thus the mark of…

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Discrimination on the Taxpayer’s Dime? The Fight To Curtail the Overreach of RFRA

…Hobby Lobby—where the Court noted that even if women could not obtain cost-free contraception coverage through their employer’s health plan, they could still purchase contraception—unaccompanied immigrant children in custody don’t have that freedom. In addition, Hamilton said, “rape is different” from access to contraception. “Courts have not had a chance to do the weighing of a victim of sexual assault versus the religious claims of an organizati…

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Why Don’t White People Show Up For Juneteenth The Way They Showed Up For George Floyd?

…slaughtered sons, daughters (and vice versa). It’s Black folks celebrating freedom… or at least being “free-ish.” That, I believe, is at the root of the Juneteenth conundrum; the difficulty of seeing and accepting Black Joy, not Black Excellence, not Black Girl Magic, or any other formulation of Blackness that requires Black folks to exhibit superhuman levels of suffering or perseverance in the face of oppression. Simply the human emotion of joy….

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Is Refusal to Write Anti-Gay Cake Message a Violation of Religious Freedom?

…s on the cake makes it more complicated, because it implicates the baker’s free speech rights. It’s one thing to request that a baker furnish a cake that might be used to celebrate something to which the baker objects—that’s a kind of second-degree complicity argument. But requiring a baker to actually perform a speech act—writing on the cake and selling it—might be more problematic from a free speech point of view. But what if there was no speech…

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“Reconciliation” With Indigenous People is Comforting For Many Canadians, But is a Christian Concept Up To The Task?

…heir own Globe and Mail essay, however, the land that settlers imagined as free wilderness was neither free nor empty. And, they write, the deadly effects of the myths of settler masculinity persist today, as the trial of Colten Boushie’s killer showed. Even if Mennonites thought they had found a pacifist’s paradise in the prairies, their deeds to the land came at the price of violence to Indigenous peoples who still understood the land as their o…

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In the Papal Pocket: Benedict XVI and the Press

…ty of which I am a part, and I take serious exception to the institution’s free ride in the press. The complexity of contemporary Catholicism—especially the fact that millions of Catholics want a participatory, democratic, horizontally integrated church with broadly based non-clerical leadership—is newsworthy. Many such important issues, including the institution’s continued efforts to shape public policy on reproductive health, Catholic teachings…

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