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6 Overlooked Takeaways From a Reviewer of Controversial Texas Textbooks

…students in a myth of Christian exceptionalism and fear of Islam. Even the best publishers can fall victim to that pressure. It’s up to all of us to keep a close watch on what goes into public school textbooks. For scholars, that means ensuring that textbook content reflects the best available scholarly consensus. For parents and other citizens, it means identifying the decision-makers responsible for adopting textbooks (this will vary from state…

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Resurrection of ‘Comstock Laws’ Would Threaten Access to Abortifacients — But Even That Fear Misses Bigger Picture

…ncy. As historian Andrea Tone has shown in detail, Lysol was just one of a number of unregulated contraceptive products advertised in women’s magazines and in newspapers. Comstockery, in other words, endangered women by creating an environment where quackery and scammers could thrive. Unsurprisingly, a harsh cleaning product had adverse effects. A 1936 book by Rachel Lynn Palmer and Sarah K. Greenberg, M.D. called Facts and Frauds in Feminine Hygi…

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RDPulpit: Rick Warren and the Limits of Empathy

…Rick Warren signed a statement of concern about global warming, joining a number of the new breed of evangelicals, much to the chagrin of the old guard like James Dobson. The press began to talk about the expanded agenda of the “new evangelicals,” an agenda not limited to the old shibboleths of abortion and opposition to gay marriage. The Five Non-Negotiable Issues Despite all the above, on a number of issues critical to women’s lives, he remains…

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A ‘Pro-Life’ Buttigieg Ambush, Trump’s Corrupt Counsel, and More

…e, and I believe that a woman ought to be able to make that decision. “The best I can offer is that if we can’t agree on where to draw the line, the next best thing we can do is agree on who should draw the line. And in my view, it’s the woman who’s faced with that decision in her own life.” His response was quickly memed and circulated by his campaign on social media, where some described Ms. Day’s engagement with the candidate as an ambush of Mr…

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Is Obama the Antichrist? Why Armageddon Stands Between the President and the Evangelical Vote

…l Been Ready.” The movie scared countless teenagers (and probably an equal number of adults) into preparing for the rapture. Millennial fervor swept evangelicals again in the late 1990s on the heels of the two-term Clinton presidency. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins published Left Behind, the first in a series of novels that grew into the best-selling series of the past decade (until they were finally overtaken by the true prince of darkness himself,…

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Secularism in the US is Larger, More Diverse and More Dynamic Than Ever, But You Wouldn’t Know it From the Media

…ding Hemant Mehta and Captain Cassidy, who were pushed out of the blogging site Patheos by onerous new guidelines requiring bloggers “to avoid politics and criticism of other worldviews, two things increasingly important to our writers since the merging of evangelicalism and conservative politics in 2016.” But while “Patheos Nonreligious was focused tightly on the self-declared atheist and humanist demographic, OnlySky aims to serve a much broader…

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Let’s Get Lost: Mapping Religion in the 21st Century

…map (as compiled by Salatomatic, an Islamic guide to mosques) compiled the number of mosques per state, while the second, using U.S. Department of State data, charts the number of refugees arriving in each state (from October 2014-July 2015), and the third offers “a compilation of Islamic terror activity by state” pairing the names of organizations with U.S. cities (for instance, Boca Raton, Florida, is flagged for “Al Qaeda”). The source for this…

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The Religious Right and the Tea Party on “Education Choice”

…t in our education system that we can use to provide our children with the best possible education here in the state of Maine.” Other proponents see this as a first step toward having education dollars following all students to any school their families choose—indeed, toward further privatization. But there is a debate within conservative circles over whether or not shifting public funds to private or quasi-private institutions is the best strateg…

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

…justice system. It’s not just that American prisons hold disproportionate numbers of African Americans. It’s that this racial composition created public support for, or at least indifference towards, “tough on crime” and “law and order” policies. Politicians have been able to pass harsh sentencing laws and build more prisons in part because deeply entrenched racial prejudices make the general public less likely to sympathize with the low-income A…

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Top Five (Less Sensational, But More Dangerous) Things to Remember About Pat Robertson (1930-2023)

…asn’t clear what proportion of his imagined scenarios about end-times were best understood as a sort of imaginative wish-fulfillment—like Hollywood entertainment or twisted dream-work—as opposed to something on track to be enacted in flesh and blood. If we turn to sermons with similar scenarios today, featuring a rhetoric of preparing for “civil war” or “Holy War,” the proportions aren’t any clearer. Sadly, even the least alarmist and most metapho…

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