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The Revolution Will Not Be Fetishized: Taking Resistance Beyond the Spiritual Industrial Complex

…that guarantees both freedom of and from religion. Hence, I am certain the number of self-proclaimed “spiritual but not religious” people at the marches on January 21st was significant. But, more importantly, I wonder what those spiritual people will do now to resist the oppressive policies and efforts of the Trump administration? It is not enough to raise their signs at Women’s Marches, lower their bodies into downward dog at Lolë “peace” events,…

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Rumors of the Suicide of the Liberal Church Are Exaggerated: A Response to Chris Hedges

…ot least by institutions like UTS) have probably repelled roughly an equal number of people as they have attracted—and meanwhile there has been a net loss of wealthy donors and elite allies. One might expect Hedges to approach this as a trade-off. Indeed it is a sort of tradeoff for him—“a heads you win, tails we lose” variant between selling out and abandoning ship. It is unclear how invested Hedges is in the survival of liberal institutions—but…

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RDPulpit: Rick Warren and the Limits of Empathy

…Rick Warren signed a statement of concern about global warming, joining a number of the new breed of evangelicals, much to the chagrin of the old guard like James Dobson. The press began to talk about the expanded agenda of the “new evangelicals,” an agenda not limited to the old shibboleths of abortion and opposition to gay marriage. The Five Non-Negotiable Issues Despite all the above, on a number of issues critical to women’s lives, he remains…

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Obama’s AIPAC Speech Hardly a Change to Believe In

…such special interest groups as AIPAC. This speech may have cost him large numbers of these smaller, progressive donors without gaining him much from the small numbers of larger, more conservative donors. Indeed, there may not be a single policy issue where Obama’s liberal base differs from the candidate more than on Israel/Palestine. Not surprisingly, the Green Party and its likely nominee, former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, along wit…

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The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

…itutional rights.” There are, as with most of Reed’s biblical analogies, a number of basic textual and historical problems here. To scratch the surface: Roman citizenship would have been rare among the earliest followers of Christ; Paul probably was not a citizen himself (this detail appears in the romanticizing later narrative of Acts of the Apostles, but not in Paul’s own letters); and, the “emperor’s household” in Philippians was a reference to…

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Good News: Religious Outreach Works On Vaccine Hesitancy. Bad News: We Need It.

…them and for everyone around them. The good news here is that significant numbers of the hesitant and resistant respond to faith-based approaches. And although PRRI estimates that about 13% of all Americans are “generally agreeable to QAnon theories,” those same people respond the best to those approaches. The study names six such techniques: A religious leader encouraging vaccine acceptance A religious leader getting a vaccine Religious communit…

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The Conservative Bible Project: Looking for Conservative Diamonds in a Liberal Dung-Hill

…“only-begotten son” of John 1:18, the “bloody sweat” of Luke 22:43-44, the number six hundred sixty-six in Revelation 13, and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 (which enjoins women to be silent in church). One of the main reasons for differences between newer translations of the Bible and the KJV is that the latter does not consistently reflect what scholars now believe to be the earliest and best ancient manuscripts. Conservative Christian groups usually op…

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Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism is More Kosher Than You Think

…e anti-Zionist Jewish history and culture Nadler is talking about? Do the classical sources of Rabbinic thought and law actually agree that anti-Zionism is antisemitism—or that a secular state of Israel was even desirable? If it is true, as Marc Tracy writes in the New York Times, that “[i]n 2024, anti-Zionism is the closest thing organized Judaism has to heresy,” then for most of Jewish history it may have been closer to the opposite. For 2000 ye…

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Francis Must Make Changes to Have a Real Effect

…s remained fairly steady in recent decades is “the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.,” which has masked “the large number of people who have left the Catholic church.” According to Pew, approximately one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church and 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics. If you were a business losing one-third of your customers, wouldn’t you want to make some changes? Sur…

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Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial clai…

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