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The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon

…mmunity that I can lead them to more familiarity with a very great text. A number of times you bring up Thomas Jefferson’s abridgement of the Gospels. He seems to be someone who, in some ways, you’re identifying with but also making very different choices from. I don’t have the luxury of just snipping out the parts of the Bible I don’t like. Whereas I greatly admire Jefferson and the Enlightenment figures for their courage in blasting through so m…

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Dispatches From the Rhodian Shore: A (Tough) Love Letter to Religious Studies

…nature in economics. Most of the rest of my argument builds on data point number 5, focusing on how religious studies (as if that’s a monolithic thing) to date has talked about the natural world. I share the below as someone who is at the core of my training a religionist who’s vested in using education to build a better, more sustainable society. I recognize that understanding the role of religion in society is of import as we work toward this g…

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Was Ghana Anti-Gay Scare Just Politics?

…ed “to get rid of these people in the society.” Some observers believe the number of sexual minorities may have been inflated in order to whip up opposition to homosexuality which could advance the standing of conservative politicians. Graham Knight, a British blogger living in Ghana, recently wrote that the claim of 8,000 sexual minorities has little support in fact. Knight concluded, in a blog post titled Did Ghana register 8000 homosexuals? The…

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Is Abortion No Longer Significant for Evangelicals — or Has it Just Become Like Water?

…%). When Coney Barrett was nominated in September of 2020, Trump’s polling numbers among white evangelicals had dipped to a low of 55% in August 2020. However, once her nomination was made public that number rose to the normal average of 71%. Coney Barrett’s record on reproductive rights was a central issue in her confirmation hearings, as Anna North points out at Vox: Barrett, a Catholic and member of the religious group People of Praise, has als…

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A Twisted Love Story: How American Evangelicals Helped Make Putin’s Russia and How Russia Became the Darling of the American Right

…ese Americans with no historical ties to Orthodoxy, became a majority in a number of Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States and brought with them their cultural baggage—most importantly the Culture Wars. The changes were obvious and immediate, both in traditional Orthodox countries and in the diaspora. Of course, Orthodoxy has never been gay-affirming (despite John Boswell’s eloquent but unsubstantiated claims) and abortion had been cause for…

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How a Ruling for Masterpiece Cakeshop Could Embolden White Nationalists

…or even federal—protections aimed at combatting discrimination against any number of marginalized populations. “The cultural and political prominence of religious freedom as an American ideal draws people to it,” Wenger said. “The reason people appeal to it for all sorts of purposes is because it’s so culturally, politically, and legally powerful.” Indeed, as Wenger’s book documents in deep historical detail, the bedrock American principle has alr…

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Proposition 8—the Rematch?

…promotion of the homosexual agenda.” As might be expected, however, AFA’s number one achievement was the passage of California’s Proposition 8—the anti-same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. ++++++++++ RD Tidbits Wycliffe USA’s “The Last Languages Campaign”: A donor that wishes to remain anonymous has given $50 million to the ministry to be used for “The Last Languages Campaign,” an effort aimed at “translating the Bible into the remaining 2…

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Conservative Christianity and Its Discontents

…essor, not buying it,” suggesting that expertise is really just opinion. A number of thoughtful evangelicals are alarmed at the surging anti-intellectualism within their ranks. And there are many academic historians, geneticists, psychologists, and other intellectuals within the Christian tradition who do not deny the knowledge claims of their respective fields. Such believers, however, are viewed with suspicion if they do not speak the language o…

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Are We Entering the End Times for Mainline Seminaries?

…s in both the number of churches that could support such positions and the number of people eager to take the more challenging, but lower paying, church jobs that remained. Some seminaries shifted their missions to serve the academy or society more broadly, while others trained more part-time, second-career and lay pastors. These shifts were less abrupt than decisions to close or merge a seminary, but they were often quite jarring for faculty and…

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Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

…pages I’ll confine myself to Religulous.) This is the kind of thing a fair number of my students, raised in the Protestant-dominated United States (even Catholics and Jews have assimilated this definition), come to university thinking about religion; the two key components of which are “belief” and “God.” Religion is some cryptic interior, individual thing that exists in one’s own head, and is only understood in relation to a God. I don’t blame my…

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