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Teach Your Children Well: Challenging Religion-Based Sexism

…ly accepted norm. According to a recent article on The Root, an increasing number of black girls are being sold into prostitution and sex trafficking, while “in both the international and national anti-trafficking movements, black girls who are victims of prostitution are invisible.”  In a review of the new book Girls Like Us by sex trafficking activist Rachel Lloyd, writer Rinku Sen notes, the black and Latina girls with whom Lloyd works are thou…

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The 50 Shades of Evangelicalism

…evolution is incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” a significant number of evangelicals are working to convince their fellow believers of their compatibility. Their efforts are evident in the increasing number of books, conferences, and organizations—such as Francis Collins’ BioLogos—that have formed around the topic. Cracks are likewise showing in what once was understood as a unanimous and uncritical evangelical support of Israel as ep…

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Demonized and Demonizing No More.

…s atheism away from the kind of polemic that ends up focusing on truth claims in a very literal way and so mirrors the religious fundamentalisms it would like to dismantle. A few months ago, when we were together at an interfaith conference, I posed to you the question of whether American atheism as a movement could further dislodge itself from a polemic truth claims approach by historicizing itself and narrating its own emergence as a movement. P…

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Right Wingers Say “Gay” is Out, But Try Putting “Unnatural Vice” On a Bumper Sticker

…eny minority of people may take away their right to tell gays and lesbians that God will send them to hell for all eternity — out of love, mind you. But, then again, anti-gay Evangelicals have a right to be afraid. After all, researchers say the actual number of Evangelicals may well be “as small as 7 percent of the total adult population.” Which means Evangelicals know just how effective a small number of people can be at taking away the rights o…

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Catholic Sex Teaching is No Laughing Matter

…Ya think??? Trouble is, this stuff really isn’t funny. In point of fact, a number of official Catholic statements on sexuality—it’s invariably sexuality and gender they’re riled up about—are downright dangerous. Take, for example, the Ugandan Catholic bishops. As Peter Montgomery reported in RD this week, they joined recently with Anglican and Orthodox bishops “to speed-up the process of enacting the Anti-Homosexuality Law.” This is the bill which…

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Death Without Religion

…is limited, we should be careful about our goals, measure the “choice of aims” against “the execution of our aims.” In other words, if you suck at acting, don’t try to be the next Meryl Streep. Of course I am oversimplifying a complex and thought-provoking book. But be warned: it’s a slog, a relentless series of thought experiments and abstruse detail. Kagan, to his credit, alerts the reader that “philosophy can be hard stuff to read.” Still, this…

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Naked Jihad

…slim Women Against FEMEN, has encouraged Muslim women to post photos of themselves—in whatever they choose to wear—with sentiments such as “Do I look oppressed to you?” or “Nudity DOES NOT liberate me and I DO NOT need saving.” A number of commenters in the group, in fact, seem to think that Femen members are the ones who are oppressed.  I myself have experienced these events as something of a roller coaster ride. As someone temperamentally shy ab…

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As Tensions Escalate in the Balkans, the West Could Hand Putin a Valuable Weapon

…de against Albanian Kosovars in the late 1990s. The fact is, a significant number of Serbs, and even a large number of others from traditionally Orthodox backgrounds, continue to harbor a great deal of anger about Western intervention in the Kosovo War, which they see as a failure by the West to comprehend the historical role-reversal that’s taken place, including the persecution of Orthodox Christians by Albanians and other majority-Muslim ethnic…

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Good News: Religious Outreach Works On Vaccine Hesitancy. Bad News: We Need It.

…e them that in this particular case at least, God helps those who helps themselves. The vaccine is the protection, for them and for everyone around them. The good news here is that significant numbers of the hesitant and resistant respond to faith-based approaches. And although PRRI estimates that about 13% of all Americans are “generally agreeable to QAnon theories,” those same people respond the best to those approaches. The study names six such…

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

…e open to anyone who wishes to attend, though there will be a limit on the number of schools (no more than ten in the next decade) and the number of students enrolled. Opponents see charter schools as quasi-privatized schools (and also fear that this is a first step toward further privatization). They see even these limited charter schools as a threat to funding for public education—especially in these difficult budget years where public education…

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