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Should NASA Have Given $1.1 Million to a Theology Institute?

…less the government is actively requiring citizens to do something, courts today tend to be sympathetic toward public expressions of religion. “If he sues, he won’t have standing,” said Ledewitz. “Not on the constitutional claim.” In its statement, NASA explained that it had received the letter from the FFRF and was “thoroughly reviewing the grant awarded to CTI. Until that review is complete, NASA will refrain from responding to FFRF’s claims.” A…

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Satanic or Systemic? Promise Keepers Are Back and Looking to End Racism Via ‘Trickle-Down Racial Reconciliation’

…y unchanged since the height of Promise Keeper popularity. Fast forward to today and Promise Keepers are inhabiting a new landscape dominated by social media, hyper-partisanship, and balkanized media outlets that keep Americans of every background in cocoons of confirmation bias. Whereas in the ‘90s Promise Keepers were at the forefront of articulating what would become a 21st century American Christian masculinity, they’re now just one of many as…

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Updated: Netflix’s Gay Jesus Upsetting Brazilian Christians Has a Centuries-Old History

…ion were more daring 120 years ago than anything Porta dos Fundos is doing today. Or there’s The Book of Mormon, which contains the rousing, blasphemous anthem “Hasa Diga Eebowai,”5 which to anyone who cares, translates as “F*ck you God!” Or David Javerbaum’s hilarious play, An Act of God, that has God apologize for latent psychopathic tendencies by saying “I made mankind in My image, and I’m an asshole.” So, when it comes to Christian religious c…

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A Short Theological Take on Why Messianic Jews Are Christians

…istory, there have always been rivulets of Jews who accept Jesus, and that today’s messianics perpetuate these, when the outside monies they now attract started burgeoning only suddenly in the 1970s, as the turn of the millenium neared, with its recurring hope for the Second Coming and even the end of the world.” When, he asks, “in previous history have rivulets of Jewish messianics received such largesse?” He concludes, “Today the mask is coming…

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Fear, Guns, and the (Unwinnable) War Against Death: A Letter to My Fellow Americans

…ore. More than that, the nature of everyday life for most of us in America today is deadly for the world around us. The machines that facilitate our daily life exploit the fossil fuel spoils of the underworld, slowly turning the planet into a kind of living hell. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose knew that, even if many of us choose to ignore that it’s happening; phenomena like mass species extinctions are affecting us deeply. Rose argued that in t…

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No, I Don’t Owe My Yoga Mat to Vivekananda

…esulted in the posture practice at the center of popularized forms of yoga today. So to even suggest, that yoga “won the West”—and that Vivekananda was the key player—is a gross simplification of modern yoga’s long, complex history. So why might someone insist on simplifying the history of modern yoga? Perhaps it’s because we crave an origins myth that romanticizes the encounter between “East” and “West” and downplays the dark sides of that histor…

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Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

…abor movement is solidly progressive. It has been the biggest single force promoting universal, government-supported health care coverage, protecting Social Security from Wall Street privatizers, and advancing a green jobs/green energy future. But that’s not all. The racist, jingoist, homophobic, misogynistic movement of American labor’s worst years—the George Meany/Lane Kirkland years—is long dead and buried. Today’s labor leadership is solidly a…

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Will Anti-Gay Churches Have Their Tax Exempt Status Revoked?

…ne, and activity. And, despite the vociferous objections to comparisons of today’s anti-gay efforts to segregation, it was, in fact, a fear that the IRS would crack down on racially segregated schools that mobilized the religious right in the 1970s. According to historian Randall Balmer in his book, Thy Kingdom Come, religious right leaders were far more concerned about the IRS’s revocation of the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University over its…

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Swimming Against the Tide: Religious (Non) Affiliation Might Not Mean What You Think It Means

…Such changes in declared identification have huge implications for society today. And yet the import and meaning of these changes are likely more nuanced than how they often are portrayed. A mouse pad decorated with a school of ancient “ichthus” Christian symbols (and a contemporary “evangellyfish” headed in the opposite direction). Image via Zazzle.com. A few examples: Self-reported church attendance is roughly the same today as in the 1940’s and…

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Mormons’ Puzzling Indifference to Easter

…irst Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. And that’s today.” The elders rolled their eyes at each other. “Where’d you hear that?” one asked. “My Chaucer class,” I said. “The early Christians put Easter as close as possible to a full moon so people could still have light at night to go on pilgrimage.” (FYI: a literature degree can be very useful in writing about religion, and vice versa.) They laughed. “Sister Welker, that may…

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