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Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

…are winning in state after state. In the past six years, we’ve doubled the number of private school choice programs to 50, the number of private school choice states to 25, plus Washington, D.C., and doubled the number of students currently benefiting from private school choice to 400,000. All told, together, we’ve helped more than a million kids in private school choice programs, and we’re just getting started. “Just getting started”: we should n…

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National Review’s Kevin Williamson Comes Out Against Daughters, Misunderstands Science

…t out, but female offspring will probably go on to crank out a predictable number of their own offspring every year. In such a situation, mothers in good condition can afford to take the risk on male offspring, because they’re playing with the “house money” that nature has given them. Meanwhile, mothers in poor condition should favor female offspring, because in this scenario it’s daughters who are the “sure thing.” Notice the common theme of “mot…

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How the COVID-19 Pandemic May Permanently Change Our ‘Good Death’ Narrative

…he Good Death in mid-19th century America as a part of respectable middle-class expectation as much as it was about any particular religious affiliation. One died at home in the presence of family around the deathbed. The dying person was conscious of death’s approach and willing to accept it. Family members assessed the spiritual state of the dying in relation to the deathbed scene, including careful attention to the dying person’s last words. An…

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A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

…that happened over a twelve month period in my family’s life (as well as a number of flashbacks from when I was a young boy). In addition, there were a number of things I didn’t get the chance to explore for a very practical reason: I had a deadline. Working in publishing I’m very conscious about how important deadlines are. Writers need to make those deadlines and because I worked in the industry I wanted to be respectful about that. There were a…

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None Means None (Not Atheist, Agnostic, Unbeliever…)

…sticism. Religion News Service regrets the inaccuracy.” Well, okay. Take a number if you’d like to complain about my own writerly inaccuracies. Still, the trouble with the piece goes beyond an inaccurate (though indisputably grabby) headline. Reporter Kimberly Winston is careful to point out that the Pew report authors have noted “that [the religiously unaffiliated] are by no means homogeneous.” She goes on to highlight Pew researchers’ noting of…

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Data-Mining The Denominations: The Southern Baptists in Four Charts

…blems as well. The SBC had been almost flat on the membership charts for a number of years, but now it’s actually started to lose members. In 2013, the SBC claimed 15,735,640 members, and in 2014, that number fell by 236,467 to 15,499,173—that’s a 1.5 percent decline. However, on this stat alone, the claim could be made that churches are simply clearing out the cobwebs and tidying up their membership rolls so their numbers more accurately reflect…

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Elephant Orphans and Ecological Spiritualities: An Earth Day Reflection

…ysteries of these creatures. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. A large number of the “spiritual but not religious” crowd in the West are self-proclaimed ecologists or naturalists. A large number of atheists and agnostics are deeply passionate about ecological ethics, or how we might be more “in tune” with nature. Culturally, they become fascinated in the personalities of cats and cat videos, the companionship of dogs who offer a kind of faithf…

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To Be Queer, Gifted, and Black: A Conversation with Theologian Pamela Lightsey

…e notion of queering and how it connects to theology? I actually taught a class in a church, a queer theology class, and a student asked, “Queer and theology, do those two go together?” And as we walked through the class over the course of the semester, she got to understand why they do. Now the word “queer” has a history behind it, some painful history behind it, for those within the LGBTQ community. That history has to do with lesbians and gay p…

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The Problem with AMC’s Sci-Fi Hit Humans

…human form isn’t always best for the job. Take, for example, the synth telephone operator. Why create a physical robot for this job which has to receive audio through a wired earpiece and then respond via speaker into a microphone? Couldn’t synth software do the trick without complex parts that mimic the functions of ears and a mouth? Furthermore, wouldn’t it make better economic sense to distribute artificial intelligence across multiple hardware…

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Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, and Pro-Home Birth

…he topic of abortion until she realized she was part of a community with a number of conservative religious midwives and doulas who do not believe that abortion should be legal. “I realized the silence on abortion wasn’t about agreement, but dissention,” Pérez says. That Prentice and Pérez both use the word “choice” when discussing childbirth care can be confusing, until one realizes that, in this context, choice refers to a woman’s right to safe…

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