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Don’t Call It “Prayer Shaming”: Our Moral Failure Exposed

…enured defense of guns. Andy Parker, father of Alison Parker, the Virginia news anchor who was murdered in August while reporting live, suggested that these invocations of prayers and positive thoughts are code words for deliberate political inaction by elected officials. The theological commentary on this shooting is what my grandmother would describe as “too heavenly minded and no earthly good.” These conversations about prayer reflect a graver…

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Declaring a Theological State of Emergency: Trump’s Ignorance Must Not Be Ours

…up of Muslims, including feminist journalist Asra Nomani, is calling for a new movement: “We are Muslims who live in the 21st century. We stand for a respectful, merciful and inclusive interpretation of Islam. We are in a battle for the soul of Islam, and an Islamic renewal must defeat the ideology of Islamism, or politicized Islam, which seeks to create Islamic states, as well as an Islamic caliphate. We seek to reclaim the progressive spirit wit…

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Why Belief in the Primacy of Language Leads to a Misunderstanding of Richard Dawkins, Islamophobia, and Politics

…ierarchy of information and affect is so intractable that new information, new ideas, new encounters can’t reshape your affects. And in a lot of ways, I think what we’re seeing right now is a sort of a struggle going on between different affects, different affective strategies for responding to the situation. I do think that people can be confronted with new perspectives that give them an avenue to another affect. The other piece of viral content…

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I’m Too Sexy for My Church: Will a Thriving Singles Scene Renew American Catholicism?

…ct rather than the goal of young adult ministry. At a post-Mass dinner for newcomers to the YMA, several of the 26 women and 14 men—both new and old members—say they’re seeking friendship and community. Most newcomers introduce themselves as transplants from around the country. A young man, visiting from Michigan, is checking out the church community to see if Santa Monica might be a good place to move. A group leader emphasizes that through YMA y…

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Does “Religious Freedom” Deserve Scare Quotes?

…ion (See: Indiana, Arkansas, Mississippi) have changed the RFRA game. This new framework shifts RFRA’s intent from remedying an actual injury, to instead serve as an enforcement mechanism for the socially conservative understanding of law and, most crucially, sexual morality. (The question around what extent Congress should be legislating our bedroom behavior is another beast entirely.) This new, mutant form of “religious liberty” does indeed dese…

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How Fitbit Helps a Conservative Evangelical College Monitor Students’ Bodies For Christ

…ved that the survival of his own namesake university depended on its honor code, which mandated not just chasteness and academic honesty, but also that students “practice good health habits and regularly participate in wholesome physical activities.” ORU, like other evangelical universities, does not only enforce negative prohibitions—it also prescribes a positive vision of the “good” student. This prescriptive model—what ORU has called its “whole…

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Race, Reparations and the Search for Our Molecular Soul

…ience, and then you add to that DNA, which has been called things like the code of codes, the holy grail. We give it this kind of supernatural significance. So, I think it’s a combination of being a society that values data, being a society that equates progress with scientific development, and being a society that thinks that genetics—in part because DNA comes from you, from us, from we—is the ultimate information, the ultimate data. It’s like th…

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On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

…calculated pi long enough, you’d eventually find the works of Shakespeare coded in 1’s and 0’s. “Somewhere inside the digits of pi is a representation for all of us — the atomic coordinates of all our atoms, our genetic code, a coding of our motions and all our thoughts through time, all our memories…. Given this fact, all of us are alive, and hopefully happy, in pi. Pi makes us live forever. We all lead virtual lives in pi. We are immortal,” Pic…

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‘Politicized Religion’ Doesn’t Explain Evangelical Support of Donald Trump

…s (e.g., Talal Asad, José Casanova, Charles Taylor, Saba Mahmood, and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd) have argued, the delimitation of the social spheres of religion and politics, and the boundary between them, is socially-constituted, variable, and constantly contested. This does not mean that “there is no such thing” as religion or politics, or that one term can simply be collapsed into the other; it means that what counts as religion and politics will…

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The New York Times Sunday Review has a Mormon Problem

…terization of Mormonism as a “white God’s” plan “for whites” would come as news to millions of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Asia, Latin America, and Africa who have claimed Mormonism as their own. Missionary proselytizing certainly entails its own racial problematics, and one will find in the annals of Mormonism as much racial chauvinism as you’ll find in the history of any other conservative American denomination….

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