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The Non-Existent Tea Party-Religious Right God Gap

…ek at the Values Voters Summit. Here, I heard a lot of talk about economic freedom, the supposedly free-spending, monstrous, socialist government, and about the wonders of free enterprise. Most people hear that, and they think, what happened to the God talk? These people must be trying to appeal to the largely secular tea parties. But it’s there. While many tea partiers might come to a rally with an entirely secular objection to what they call “bi…

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Should Evangelicals Smoke Pot?

…tinctly unhelpful. So to be specific, Crouch says this: We at Christianity Today believe Christians are absolutely free to use marijuana (where legalized). And, when it comes to pot in our particular cultural context, we think it would be foolish to use that freedom. For the CT editors, the moral quality of marijuana use seems to depend entirely upon the “cultural context” in which it occurs. And since our particular context is not conducive to ma…

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How “Gratitude” Underwrites Inequality, Power, and Exclusion

…rket. But it does seem that the two opposing traditions have come together today to act as a powerful rhetoric of gratitude as indebtedness. Today we have a thriving self-help industry that churns out a steady stream of books on pop psychology, happiness, and gratitude. How well do these grapple with the issues you’ve raised? I was a little surprised by how little attention is paid to the history of gratitude in the self-help literature. I see my…

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New History Finally Recognizes Afro-Creole Spiritualists

…e men in 19th-century New Orleans, but the story it tells connects to much today. Religion, race and politics are closely intertwined in American history and culture today. This is not a new phenomenon. I often tell my students that when we talk about American religion, we’re also talking about politics. And when we talk about American politics, we’re also talking about race. Religion, politics and race are not unconnected and sitting in separate…

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Is Proselytizing Ever Okay? Are We All Proselytizing All The Time?

…ating my religion,” you should feel free to tell them that their religious freedom ends where your own religious freedom and moral autonomy begin. The fundamental fact remains that you haven’t asked them to change their mind about anything; you’ve only asked them to leave you alone. If we want to have a functional pluralist society at all, we need people, broadly, to respect such boundaries. Stalking and harassment shouldn’t get a pass simply beca…

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Strange Bedfellows: The American Far-Right and Today’s Jihad Do Have Something in Common — Just Not What You Think

…t the Islamic State (or ISIS as it’s colloquially known) which argues that today’s jihad has little in common with earlier iterations of that phenomenon but does share certain features with far-right movements in the West, I approach the comparative question from a different angle. Setting aside the terrorism framework, which sidesteps crucial questions about the nature of militant organizations and their appeal at this historical juncture, I inst…

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I Want a Perfect Body

…gelical devotional diet movements that first cropped up in the late 1950s. Promoting the belief that inner goodness was apparent in one’s outer aspect, this vein of devotion was built on the doctrine that “fat was sin.” A thin, firm, beautiful body, it was believed, was the visible reflection of goodness and godliness.  The idea that “fit bodies… signify fitter souls” permeates the American consciousness with anxiety about the body while shaping b…

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A Third Reconstruction? Rev. William Barber Lifts the Trumpet

…finition of “poor.” But if Harriet Tubman could lead hundreds of slaves to freedom with nothing but the North Star, moss on the trees, a pistol strapped to her leg and faith in her heart (despite lack of resources and epilepsy), then today we ought to be able to use the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, cell phones and our growing network of churches to educate the new Southern Electorate—black, white, Latino, Asian, gay, straight, labor, Christian, Je…

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Blame Series Bonus: How Federal Policy Created America’s Fergusons

…0s and 1950s, but they were prohibited from purchasing them by FHA policy. Today, those homes sell for $500,000 or $600,000. We now have a law, the Fair Housing Act, which says that African Americans are free to live anywhere they want. They can live in Levittown, they can live in the suburbs of St. Louis. But it’s not an effective remedy to tell people that they can now move to neighborhoods that have become unaffordable, when they, or their pare…

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Rumors of God’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

…ig puts it, the online community formed around Edge.org shows that some of today‘s most dynamic scientific minds all but assume atheism. Indeed, it seems implausible that the “dominant viewpoint at the American university” would be lacking intellectual vibrancy (unless, of course, Craig is claiming the intellectual bankruptcy of American academia). No; if nothing else, today‘s atheism is positively fueled by intellectual inquiry. This tone…

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