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The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

…ch that you cannot control your removal from the field of action. With the Paris attacks over the weekend, that diffusion of danger seems only magnified. Killers come from among your fellow citizens. Wars in Syria spill over into Paris, and then echo back to the Middle East. Fear itself becomes the weapon; there’s a reason we call it terrorism. When war becomes uncoupled from specific places, the timbre of trauma changes. Drone operators now suffe…

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Heterosexual Martyrs and Gay Saints: Did AIDS Coverage Clear the Way for LGBT Equality?

…series of stories about people who tested positive for the HIV virus, the Dallas Morning News included 23-year-old Charles, a gay intravenous drug user. Since learning his status, Charles stopped taking drugs and started helping people with AIDS. Although he did not belong to a religious group, he saw his work as a spiritual mission, telling the paper that “he was ‘standing in the way of the hand of God’ until he dedicated himself to helping peop…

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Battling for the Soul of the Democratic Party

…ca are (and, moreover, in the wake of Obama’s election, who will get their phone calls returned from the White House) certain names keep cropping up. Pastor Rick Warren, who sees no daylight between his views and James Dobson’s, but who, according to Sullivan’s book, former-DNC-chair Terry McAuliffe blasphemously didn’t know; Jim Wallis, best-selling author and activist who lambasts the religious right for its petty intolerance and the left for “n…

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An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?)   The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…

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Are School Districts Getting the Message on Government-Sponsored Prayer?

…ies Union of Indiana sued the district in federal court on behalf of a New Paris Elementary School first-grader and his mother. The suit alleged the boy was left unsupervised in the hallway when his mother opted him out of the weekly 20-minute Bible class. He later was sent to the school library. The suit said the boy was being deprived of educational instruction during the Bible class and that the class violated the First Amendment. Shelly warned…

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“As Orthodox As They Come”: A Backstage Conversation With Rob Bell

…re so fantastic—brought the idea that the whole thing is static. I think a number of people picked up over the past three hundred years that space is empty, we move things around in space, and there are levers and pulleys and buttons. I think for a number of people, atheism is simply the rejection of somebody sitting on a cloud somewhere with a beard who might intervene from time to time. I think quantum physics, the little I know, it just intuiti…

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Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

…ete the work that He has begun,” said Francis. The Trinity Foundation, the Dallas, Texas-based Christian watchdog group that monitors and investigates televangelism fraud, has questions, asking why the Pope would meet with religious leaders “who engage in the same kind of excesses he’s been preaching against.” In a statement, the Trinity Foundation writes: At a meeting in June, the pope greeted Kenneth Copeland of Kenneth Copeland Ministries and J…

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The Fire This Time

…ling and Philando Castile, and about the five policemen shot and killed in Dallas. I know. You want me to say something profound, the hard thing. You want me to say something passionate, something to rally you, something to make you feel like there is hope, and that we’re going to change. But that’s not what this piece is about. You see, I’m done believing. I’m done believing that writing words about this shit is going to make it better. I’m done…

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Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

…But what CNN really meant was “When asked by a complete stranger, over the phone, to define their spiritual lives in a single phrase, one-third of those adults who responded to this poll (response rate: one in ten), and who fall within an arbitrarily-defined generational frame, declined to tell the aforementioned complete stranger that they were affiliated with any specific religious group.” These are not equivalent statements. For some reason, th…

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The Religious Implications of Nudity

…ance-enhancing drugs. The sense of freedom and fun (and free food, even if airline food) was exhilarating. The airport has now become a place of horror. Do they have full-body scanners? I wonder as I’m herded into a long, bovine line. Abattoir or boudoir? Why is this bothering me so much? Don’t Touch Me There Even cursory reflection reveals my embodiment issues are buried deep in my religious upbringing. I was a teenage fundamentalist. That remark…

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