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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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Religion and Science: Toward a Postmodern Truce

…(second) generation attitude toward science and religion. The Battle Lines Today So much for intergenerational histories in the abstract; the juicy stuff always lies in the details. When we survey the opposing armies, what do we see? The forces of science: Those who start from the standpoint of science fall into three main groups: the New Atheists, who argue that the mere existence of religion is a threat to science and weakens it; the “privately…

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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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Narco-Violence and the Failure of the Church in Mexico

…h that it could have mitigated some of the underlying social problems that today create fertile ground for drug-based economies and narco-violence throughout Latin America. The liberationist vision was taken up nowhere else more seriously as by the Diocese of Cuernavaca, under the leadership of the beloved “red bishop,” don Segio Méndez Arceo. Don Sergio saw that his priests were trained as community organizers, not in seminaries but rather in the…

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Obama and the Unbelievers: The Future of Secularism

…e people are nonbelievers. But most of them probably are. According to USA Today, this group—the unaffiliated—represent one of the “fastest-growing segments of the population.” Their percentage of the electorate has already grown from 9% in 2000 to 12% this year. It may even be that the category of unaffiliated underestimates the voting power of nonbelievers. The same Pew Forum study also reported on another question in national exit polling—how o…

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PCUSA’s Nod to “Traditional” Marriage Understandable, but Not Accurate

…Thomas Head (1990) and Sarah McNamer (2010) have shown. Like Catholic nuns today, medieval women married Jesus in wedding ceremonies, replete with rings and gowns. Indeed, these marriages were functionally on par with marriages between two humans. And things could get messy when human-divine marriage and human-human marriage overlapped, as I show in my essay in Queer Christianities (NYU, 2014). This means that, for hundreds of years, medieval Chri…

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