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Why Antisemitism is an Insufficient (and Risky) Explanation for Hamas’s October 7 Attack on Israel

By Shane Burley

…nto the fabric of reality. More than this, a certain Zionist framing has become ubiquitous, where the Israeli identity becomes synonymous with Jewishness, and therefore the attack on Israel/Israelis is, categorically, an attack on Jews, which reinforces the notion that Israel is the center of the Jewish people. On October 25th, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law demanded that universities i…

A Religious History of American Neuroscience

By Leigh Eric Schmidt

…me in the SPR threw themselves behind a new contraption called the “psycho-phone” through which the inventors claimed to be hearing the voices of angels. The psychophone no doubt sounds absurd, but I can’t say that it sounds much more far-fetched than a transcranial magnetic stimulator. Both demonstrate the enduring cultural impulse toward techno-theologizing. However much neuroscientists might want to forswear an interest in the metaphysics of th…

A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?

By Tom Bartlett

…it may or may not rain. But in this case we’re saying 100 percent it will come. God with a consuming fire is coming to bring judgment and destroy the world.” I encountered this same certainty again and again. When I asked how they could be so sure, the answers were fuzzy. It wasn’t any one particular verse or chapter but rather the evidence as a whole. Some believers compared it to a puzzle. At first the pieces are spread out on a table, just sha…

Accused of Anti-Semitism, Trump Aide Makes Ancestry Appeal

By Michael Schulson

…neal descent as well, and there are Conservative and traditionalist Jewish communities that try (often unofficially) to be welcoming to both matrilineal and patrilineal Jews. In other words, there’s not a hard-and-fast, universally-accepted biological rule for what makes someone a Jew. Second of all, American Jews tend to be fairly skeptical toward the idea that you can have (at least) one Jewish grandmother, entirely walk away from Jewish traditi…

Mormons Prepare for WA Marriage Equality Fight

By Joanna Brooks

…thering phase. What will Washington Mormons for Marriage Equality do if it comes to the ballot? SH: We are organizing members on Facebook and will soon have our website up. We have already joined a Faith Action Network with Washington Catholics for Marriage Equality. Catholic archbishops allowed signatures to be collected in Catholic parishes—in the church itself. So far, at least four bishops have refused to do so, and Catholics for Marriage Equa…

Church Uses Facebook for Sacramental Scrutiny at its Peril

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ld. In the past decade, the Roman Catholic clergy abuse, News of the World phone-hacking, and Wikileaks scandals have marked new, and only very incompletely explored, ethical territory as we sort out the best ways to balance personal privacy and public safety as these are impacted by our engagement with new media. But even given difficulties defining necessary and appropriate boundaries of personal, professional, and institutional transparency, we…

Planned Parenthood ‘Stung’ By Lila Rose

By Bill Berkowitz

…arily with receptionists. Rose takes the effort farther. Video is far more compelling than recordings of phone calls. According to the Los Angeles Times: Rose, the third of eight children, grew up in San Jose. Her father is an engineer for Sun Microsystems. She was home schooled… and also attended a part-time Christian school and a junior college throughout high school. When she was 15, she said, she founded Live Action and began giving anti-abort…

Seeing What They Wanna See: Religion Surveys Reflect Surveyors

By Nathan Schneider

…21—and it has been conducted over almost two decades, while Baylor’s first numbers come from 2006. Because researchers will inevitably craft their survey according to their own interests and assumptions, the ARIS doesn’t give respondents a list of religious identities to choose from. Instead it asks, simply, “What is your religion, if any?” and categorizes the results after the fact. “What we get is true, democratic vox populi,” boasts Kosmin. Thi…

The Sacred and the Dead: Ten Writers on the End of an American Adventure

By The Editors

…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. #5 : Three Ways to American Beauty by Aaron K. Kerr At the height of secular modernity, when Catholics were openi…

Forgiveness

By Amina Wadud

…cause something very human in the act of forgiveness is left out. Today we commemorate the famous march on Washington, let us hope the offense of racism finds such recompense in America. In Malaysia and Indonesia, at the end of Ramadan there is a custom to seek forgiveness zahir and batin for offenses done knowing and unknowingly. We do not know all the time how our actions affect another person. So to keep the level of humanity in forgiveness str…