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How AIDS Changed the Way American Christians Talk About Sex

…o many gay men affected by the AIDS crisis. I left this discussion out because, again, it took away from the cohesion of the book as a whole. And with all the recent debates about PrEP (a pill that can be used to prevent HIV transmission) and gay marriage, I felt there were more pressing issues to engage—okay, and I figured maybe the plays were best left to theatre historians and performance theorists. What are some of the biggest misconceptions a…

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“Evil,” a Cautionary Tale For Iran

…inty, is all. It is not at all clear that liberals and progressives cannot use the language of evil, of course; they simply call different things by that name. More to the point, the thoughtful use of the language of evil is subtly related to another concept, that of sacred value. Torture is deemed evil, precisely because it violates the sacred value of the individual human person. Terror and other forms of indiscriminate violence are evil for sim…

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Do Tea Partiers Use Religious Justification For Racial Rhetoric?

…ry of history”: Almighty God documents a history of meaning making and the use of those meanings to regulate bodies and identities: how Roman Catholics and Protestants looked to their respective traditions to understand marriage and race; how they “knew” their beliefs and their interpretations of texts to be correct; how those beliefs were subsequently encoded into laws that regulated human behaviors; and even how love has been, and continues to b…

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The Truth about Catholics and Condoms

…must not let a few bishops at the top hinder the global effort simply because they continue to fight change within the Church.  In 2010, the Pope made an important first step in a journey that the leaders in the Church must make towards a compassionate, realistic view of safer sex and condom use. Like any voyage, the first step is the hardest, but those of us in the Church hope and pray that our leaders will have the courage to undertake this pil…

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What do Crystal Meth and Contraception Have In Common?

…erity inquiry. It seems ridiculous to us that a religion could require the use of meth, but there is nothing new about the use of intoxicating substances as a means of facilitating communion with the divine. And in a religion like Wicca, without a central authority (like the Pope, for instance), how do we determine that the use of meth is not in fact central to this particular Wiccan’s religious exercise? I’m not suggesting we can’t determine that…

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The Blasphemy of ISIS: A 7-Point Pro-Guide to Islam(ism)

…ations of Islam. They might sound like Islam and refer to Islam, but their use of Islam is not dissimilar from the use of scientific fact by the creationist: She intends to undermine the scientific enterprise with scientific language, suggesting how wholly the discursive space has been dominated by a certain kind of language, but also how easy it is to fool the outsider into thinking he is encountering a serious, rigorous, and historically and tex…

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The Porn Workaround: How Christian Sexuality Websites Avoid Sin

…ans enjoy what God created for them. They believe that married couples can use the sites because they can keep their sexual thoughts within the confines of marriage, imagining only their spouse as they read and contribute to discussions. These evangelicals have faith that if anyone uses the sites as porn then God will hold them accountable. As one online store owner explained to me, “It’s not my job to be the Holy Spirit and convict people.” Evang…

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The Bible Is Not a Diet Plan

…est Bible student turn back.” Genealogies are “boring” and “difficult”—because we can’t use them. But they were recorded and preserved with such care because the strangers who wrote that book could use them. For the huge majority of human history, they were the measure of a man’s life. They bound you to your history and your land; they gave you a place among cousins, grandparents, sprawling generations of ancestors, in a rooted institution radical…

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Pope Francis Dismisses Condoms in AIDS Fight

…gn, Kenyan Archbishop Peter Kairo said, “As the Catholic Church we are not promoting use of condoms. I don’t agree with the advertisements on the billboards and newspapers that say Catholics believe in sex which is sacred and that they believe in using condoms.” “The hierarchy’s ill informed war against condoms goes on,” said O’Brien, who noted that these same bishops “are very often involved in the administration of Catholic charities, who take m…

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What Happens When We Use Horror Movies to Interpret the Real World? 10 Questions for the Authors of ‘The Exorcist Effect’

…aring a child’s face like a mask. These cases show what’s at stake when we use horror movies to interpret the real world. In cases like the West Memphis Three, where three young boys were murdered, it seemed that the fear, anger, and sadness experienced after a horrible and seemingly inexplicable tragedy were weaponized by authorities and opportunists to produce a simple, tidy explanation—that the murders had been part of a satanic ritual—rather t…

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