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The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

By Michelle Lelwica

…perhaps Disobedient Bodies, or even Shameless Bodies (since my argument is really that no body is shameful!). Any of these latter titles would have foreshadowed my understanding of nonconforming bodies as refusing—rather than failing—to live up to the monotonous fantasy of physical perfection. I like the idea that our bodies themselves intelligently rebel against the rigidly defined, normalizing ideals that guide dominant understandings of “physic…

Feeding on the Faithful: How Supernatural Thinking Empowered the Third Reich

By Eric Kurlander

…pernatural thinking in the Third Reich. How do you feel about the cover? I really like it. We started with some literally monstrous images and then pared it back to this more evocative, perhaps even darkly ruminative cover. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? Wow, there are so many. In terms of this particular theme, my former Harvard colleague Corinna Treitel’s A Science for the Soul is an exceedingly well-research…

Pope Denounces Gender Colonization; Indonesian Court Considers Islamist Request To Criminalize Homosexuality; Egypt’s Grand Mufti Says No One Has Right to Harm Homosexuals; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…they’re running away, etc. This is the first time you can see open-minded, really educated people that speak at least three languages, Arab gay guys who are actually not so far from the Western [way of] life and can talk at the same eye level as Western people… I identify with almost 80 percent of the Arab world because there is at least 20 percent that I cannot even relate to. I’m talking about fanatic Islam and I’m talking about Muslims that are…

The Demographic that Should Keep Rove Awake at Night

By Katherine Stewart

…continues to erode—from 21 percent in 2007 to 19 percent in 2012—while the number of the religiously unaffiliated is rising—from 16 percent to 20 percent over the same period. In other words, “nones” and evangelicals are equivalent in numbers. One explanation for this change in America’s religious complexion is that white Christians are aging: 72 percent of voters over 65 are white Christians, compared to only 26 percent of voters under 30. Pew al…

Conservative Christians Insist the Toxic Theology Portrayed in the Duggar Family Doc is ‘Fringe’ — But is it Really All That Different?

By Caroline Matas

…es between the two. In fact, The Gospel Coalition (TGC) itself platforms a number of pastors whose views seem more or less in line with Gothard’s. TGC contributor Voddie Baucham, for example, is a strong proponent of early and often corporal punishment for children, even going so far as to advocate “all-day sessions” of physical punishment for toddlers in order to “wear them out.” Baucham, who helped popularize the Stay-at-Home-Daughter Movement,…

Nostalgia Voters? Not Really. Trump and His Supporters Value This More Than the Past

By Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead

…but the percentages above suggest that with Trump in power, his supporters really don’t pine for some abstract, mythical golden era at all. Remember: they don’t venerate the past; they value power. In fact, Trump’s supporters are even more positive about the current situation under his administration than the figure above suggests. When we asked Americans to choose a specific year that America was at its best, it turns out they are far more likely…

The Right’s Satanic-Grammy-Panic Isn’t About the Devil or Pfizer or Even Scantily-Clad Women — It’s All About the Transphobia

By Mary Rambaran-Olm

…aditional” values when they’re too cowardly to admit that it’s change that really scares them. What’s probably most upsetting for people like Ben Shapiro is that Kim Petras is just another woman whose special grown-up time zone he can’t make drier than the Sahara. Maybe I don’t really understand what “evil” means after all. I think men walking into schools and murdering children is evil. Forcing rape victims to endure unwanted pregnancies is evil….

Is Sam Harris Really a White Supremacist?

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…for writing that Islamophobic incidents in the United States are “tiny in number, often property-related, and still dwarfed five-fold by similar offenses against Jews.” Aziz countered that violence done against one minority should never be downplayed because there is greater violence against another minority. Harris has the supreme privilege—a rich, white man’s privilege, I should add—of remaining aloof and ignorant about these crimes, and it mak…

Free Will, Fate and FiveThirtyEight: The Theology of Election Polls

By Alan Levinovitz and Michael Schulson

…s on. MHS: Right—unless I decide to apply for a Canadian passport, there’s really no way that this knowledge will have a material effect on my actions, right? Also, I have to admit, the less the numbers agree with what I want to hear, the less likely I am to trust them. AL: It’s funny, here again I feel a little different from you. I’m much more excited when prediction sites confirm that what’s going to happen is counterintuitive, whether or not t…

Do Make Trouble: The Complex World of Radical Jewish ‘Revenge Theologian,’ Meir Kahane

By Shane Burley

…question I have on the writings about contemporary antisemitism is what’s really going on? What’s this actually all about? Many have written about it; for example, Hannah Arendt and contemporary Jewish historian David Engel. But who’s really reading them outside academia? The popular discussion about antisemitism today is sorely under-theorized. I just read an excellent new book, still in manuscript, by a young scholar on middle-brow Jewish writi…