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Infanticide Still Not a Growing Movement: 30 Years of Pro-Life Fudging

…sota who said children only become people at age 5. Another said “a common number that is going around is 4 years old.” Arguments that college students make to provoke activists and demonstrators should probably not be taken at face value, but more importantly neither these people nor McArdle’s article offered any data indicating an increase in support for infanticide. In fact, Gallup polls show Americans are pretty evenly divided on abortion. A r…

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Global Religious Right Asks ‘How Far Can We Get?’; And More in the Global LGBT Recap

…stitutional Court ruling in 2015. A group promoting the initiative cites a number of studies to support their argument that the initiative is needed to protect the best interest of children; among them is the widely discredited New Family Structures Study by Mark Regnerus. Their use of other studies has also been publicly challenged. From Human Rights Watch’s April 28 letter to Speaker Pinto [citations removed], which notes that the bill has alrea…

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Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

…on that gave birth to the academic disciplines. I’ve also uncovered that a number of famously “modern” intellectuals held unusual religious/spiritual beliefs that that their later followers and even critics tend to be unaware of—and might be pissed to discover/have exposed. Still, I’d rather be controversial than uphold a misguided status quo! What alternative title would you give the book? I had always meant for the title to be “The Myth of Disen…

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Faith-Based Bailout Part 3

…or the long term, and no sense that they understand the reality or the enormity of the numbers they throw around with such casual abandon. Such leaders cannot, simply cannot, save us. They cannot restore the public trust, which is the only sure way to a slower (but surer) recovery. And such a recovery will be slow. Undoing this kind of damage requires a slow-fix, not a fast one, and will take a great deal of time. It is an inelegant and unhappy bu…

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The Messiah is Not Coming

…f Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really starts humming. “The economy,” in the way that mainstream economists gauge it, and the economic well-being of everyday people has parted company for good. Polit…

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The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

…publisher allowed me to go a few thousand words over their original word limit, but I still had to cut a number of compelling stories of people who have struggled with body shame because of internalized cultural/religious norms and narratives about weight, disability, chronic pain or illness. I also had to omit some of my analyses of examples of the culture of physical improvement. For instance, in the chapter on aging, I nixed a rather lengthy cr…

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A Match Made in Hell: Demons Have Become a Serious Force in US Politics — But We’ve Seen This Show Before

…lculations, one-third of evangelicals don’t vote, and when you factor this number against the number of votes needed to tip battleground states like Pennsylvania, there’s not much convincing that needs to be done to turn the election for Trump. It might seem like a small affair, until you realize that JD Vance was one of the speakers at the Courage Tour event in Pennsylvania. Predictably, demonic rhetoric underlies a lot of the Tour. From what I’v…

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Bonnaroo Dispatches: Stages

…ons to a vague sense of morality, fairness, and happiness, what Christian Smith calls “moral therapeutic deism.” Smith bases his conclusions on an extensive survey, followed up by hundreds of face-to-face interviews. He could have just come to Bonnaroo. Those who attend yoga each morning—the most overtly spiritual practice visible at the festival—talk about their desire to be “grounded,” to “center” themselves, or, more pointedly, to “detox,” a wo…

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Bonnaroo 3: With a Buzz in Our Ears

…roup of Birmingham college students who had been persuaded by one of their number that this was worth the wait. It was. It is hard to describe the experience of standing in the second row of a rock concert, untold numbers at your back, without sounding trite. In a world in which it is possible to conduct nearly all communication via one machine or another, to travel from one climate-controlled setting to the next without exchanging so much as a mo…

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Religious Leaders Need ‘Empty the Pews’ Which Chronicles the Darker Side of the ‘Nones’ Phenomenon

…erson is liberated from the rigid nature of a religion with an extremely limited world view. These often begin with the person remembering the breaking-point moment, then explain how the individual was brought up in a family with strict religious beliefs, followed by a description of the person’s post-faith life. This is certainly not to say that these stories aren’t important or moving, it’s simply to point out that those looking for patterns in…

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