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Ultra Orthodox Murder-Suicide Makes Headlines

…itive, doesn’t it? Except for one thing: by bringing young Haredi men into contact with the permanent emergency that is Israeli civil society, Zaka and the Israeli Army have brought these young men into contact with the world of physical violence, aggression, and gun use. Hitherto protected by their insularity and separateness from Israeli society, these ultra-Orthodox males are becoming socialized to Israeli norms. And they and their community ar…

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Tribal Trouble: The Changing Nature of American Jews’ Relationship to Israel and the Question of Jewish Unity

…reements about matters concerning Israel. We can point to the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism; the non-statist American Zionists, such as rabbis Abba Hillel Silver and Stephen Wise (who only agreed to join Ben-Gurion’s statist project after the Biltmore Conference in May, 1942); and the anti-occupation group Breira that emerged after the Yom Kippur War in 1973; among many others. The new heresy The identification of Zionism with Jewishne…

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Trump’s Inaugural Address Gets an “F” in American Civil Religion

…elation of sovereignty to power, citizens to the state, that characterizes American politics. Sovereignty, in American politics, is rooted in the people. Rather than resting in a monarch, American popular sovereignty is a matter of negotiation and compromise, a matter of relation. Not only does such popular sovereignty not look much like the old-school, European variety—which gets shorthanded as “tyranny” in our founding documents—it is also an id…

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Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

…ist sense of humor may not be subtle. The mayor of Des Moines welcomes the American Atheists to Des Moines. “We’re receptive to all people, regardless of church or lack of church. We are a better community and a better world with diversity,” he says. (Later in the conference we will hear that initial contact with the city of Des Moines resulted in a curt reply that Des Moines was a Christian city, thank you very much and don’t call again. Someone…

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American Christianity Is Changing Fast: Five Stories to Watch in 2016

…er urban churches—and some of those that have a longer history in a particular city—are now congregations of mostly young creative types who live in the vicinity. What will happen when urban hipster churches, like Hillsong, Oasis and RealityLA, come into contact with other churches and urban ministries? (Indeed, do they ever come into contact or do they each maintain their own spheres of involvement?) And what will become of the Christian urban pr…

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Behind a Recent Stunt in Idaho Lies a Dangerous Theocratic Movement

…complex cultural systems, and the toxic mixture that comes together in the American Redoubt movement represents a feedback loop between American-style white supremacist patriarchy on the one hand, and the varieties of Christianity that have been invoked throughout U.S. history to uphold it, on the other. A similar dynamic can be observed in the conspiratorial John Birch Society (JBS), in which Catholic and Protestant members come together in advoc…

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No One Can Tell I’m a Muslim: All-American Muslim Debuts

…ge anti-Muslim bigotry, choosing a cast of immigrants and first-generation Americans, all Arab American save the newbie white convert, may just propel the show into another set of tropes: all Muslims are Arabs, all Arabs are Muslim, and all Muslims are immigrants. Indeed some Muslims are Arab, some Arabs are Muslim, and some Muslims are immigrants. But many are not. Many will celebrate the show, and those who do may read this review (if they get t…

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Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

…and the idea of “mission,” one that bears little resemblance to the “cold contact witnessing” model I learned on a teen missions trip nearly 30 years ago. (It would have been more effective literally to throw Bibles at the heads of unsuspecting passersby than it was to accost complete strangers with questions such as “where would you spend eternity if you died tonight” or “do you know Jesus as your personal Lord and savior”?) “We are beginning to…

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Capricology: Divine Madness

…s the ability to instantly acquire the skills she needs to get through the flight simulator. She argues in effect that she doesn’t want to do things the easy way; she wants to earn her way through the virtual world. I am reminded of the ongoing debates around multiplayer games about what constitutes cheating and whether it is appropriate for a character to pay real cash to buy a ready-made avatar which can function at higher levels than they have…

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Before We Scold DeSean Jackson and Others For Anti-Semitism We Need To Talk About ‘Chosenness’

…lbany or Washington—are controlled by Jews. I think they are controlled by Americans, and the American Negro situation is a direct result of this control. And anti-Semitism among Negroes, inevitable as it may be, and understandable, alas, as it is, does not operate to menace this control, but only to confirm it. It is not the Jew who controls the American drama. It is the Christian. At the time of Baldwin’s writing these were some of the most powe…

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