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Eyes on the Prize, Rainbow People! A Post-DOMA Challenge

…not a day to say, as one lesbian interviewed on NPR said, “they saved the best for last.” In fairness, the person interviewed was telling an otherwise compelling story about the need for queer people to make common cause with low-wage workers. She and her spouse are small-time farmers in the Central Valley: in that context they can feel how wrong it would be for them to say “thank you very much” to the Supremes and then proceed to ignore the econ…

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Trump In Colorado: When the “Facts” Are No Longer Checkable

…at world. Any such claim is laughably unpersuasive, despite James Dobson’s best efforts. Rather, I mean “faith” not in any specifically theological sense, but more in the sense of the evidence of things not seen. (The “substance of things hoped for” is what Trump alone can provide, judging from his RNC address). Initially, this came in thinking about Trump’s RNC portrayal of an America in grave peril of mass death from drunk drivers who happen to…

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Millennials Put Off By Rigid, Judgmental Religion Offered … More Orthodoxy

…rches that demand orthodoxy—another word for holiness—are the ones that do best. That’s even true! Conservative churches do fare better these days than liberal ones, though the sociologists tell me that’s mostly the result of their later adoption of birth control. The cultural trends are the cultural trends, even if they do take longer to catch up with some groups than others. It makes a certain surface amount of sense, then, that Shrum would argu…

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The Secret Life of Mormons: As Told by Prodigal Daughter, Novelist Judith Freeman

…Mormonism. Yes. I think there is a lot of desiring and settling for second best. And part of the result is an enormous amount of depression and use of anti-depressants among Mormon women. Men often don’t fare much better. They have unmet desires and shame and secrets that I believe lead to an extremely high statistic of men looking at pornography. There is a price to be paid for hiding things, for keeping parts of yourself secret. A lot of people…

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Why We Should Ban Oppressive Speech Acts

…e, when these speech acts are enacted, is not (to paraphrase Wittgenstein) best read through “the language game of reporting,” or the language game we might call the “open exchange of ideas.” The most obvious response is: Why not simply respond with better speech acts? “Speak truth to perlocutionary effect,” if you will. I want to specifically address why racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-immigrant speech acts—qua speech acts—are best combated…

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Is Monsanto Satan? The Pleasure and Problem of Conspiracy Theory

…le, because the deceiver is so powerful that any contact risks corruption. Best to avoid it entirely, lest you end up like Bill Nye, the Science Guy, who changed his mind on GMOs after visiting Monsanto. Under most circumstances, the reasonable explanation would be that Nye was persuaded by argument and evidence. But for those who believe in Monsatan, the better—the only—explanation is that Nye was coerced, just as the best explanation for my skep…

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SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

…chers, he uses his own spiritual practice to show his riders how to be the best versions of themselves…Get ready for a spiritual journey disguised as a rock concert! And here’s James J., an instructor at studios in and around New York City: Since starting his journey at Soul, James has discovered what can be done together—as a family—with the lights down low, the music up high, and our hearts wide open. Many riders seem to buy in. From a customer’…

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Pope Francis v. Kim Davis: A Vatican Game of Thrones

…ed a rebuttal to the Vatican’s statement on the meeting, which is naïve at best. Staver lying at the Values Voters Summit about 100,000 people in Peru praying for Kim Davis proves that he’s willing to stretch a story to fit the narrative of Kim Davis as a Martyr and “conscientious objector.” No matter how much he may continue to assert that “Vatican officials approved the visit,” I would suspect the only Vatican official he most likely spoke with…

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Prisoners In the Hands of an Angry God: A Conversation About Religion and Reform

…document how religion causes people to take certain political stances. At best, however, the authors have isolated a correlation between perceptions of God and stances on political reform. There’s no clear proof that one causes the other. They could both be a product, for example, of a person’s psychology. Exactly. This study does acknowledge that to some extent by noting some of the ways answers vary according to race and gender—but to isolate b…

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What the Hell is Wrong With Us? A Muslim Response to America’s Failure to Change

…ask the reader of the Qur’an, over and over again, to reflect, to use her best judgment, to make her best effort, and to learn from others? If the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was the last Prophet—and Islam certainly insists on as much—then everything he communicated has to be universal enough to be meaningful but flexible enough to reflect the nuances and characteristics of different experiences. This is one thing a lot of people don’t u…

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