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Evangelical Fiction Helped Shape a Culture of Faith — Along with Suspicion, Fear, and Resentment

…nials; and self-help books about marriage, family and child-rearing. These new “evangelical” publishers became successful in the 1950s, working with new evangelical bookstores that enjoyed huge growth since the 1970s—but which, Silliman tells us at the end of his book, are largely disappearing. Evangelical bookstores, for Silliman, constitute a “discourse community” alongside other “hubs of evangelical conversation” such as magazines, conferences,…

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American Jews: From Holocaust to New Age Hasidism?

…the ex-Chabad Hasid who has become the intellectual leader of the Jewish Renewal movement that melds Jewish tradition with New Age thinking. It is Schachter-Shalomi who, styling himself “a Jewish practitioner of generic religion,” has blurred the boundaries between the Jewish and the non-Jewish worlds through halakhic creativity in response to intermarried couples, through mobilizing the tensions inherent within kabbalistic concepts to develop a n…

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First U.S. Visit of the Virgin Mary Confirmed in Wisconsin

…th the presence of the Blessed Mother. In December, Bishop Ricken told the New York Times that the site’s approval is not connected in any way to the diocese’s various crises—but admitted that he does hope that the shrine will be a hopeful light. “People have a hunger for the spiritual, and right here in our backyard was a source to meet that need,” he says. Gather the Children Karen Tipps, full-time caretaker at the shrine, adds: “A lot of people…

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New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

…others was even more unrealistic than it is today.” The researcher for the new study, Mark Regnerus, isn’t free from his own bias, however. As Freedom to Marry points out in a press release on the study, Regnerus,  ”is well known for his ultra-conservative ideology and the paper was funded by the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation – two groups commonly known for their support of conservative causes. The Witherspoon Institute also has…

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Sex and the Chosen People: Be Fruitful and Multiply, Etc.

…of innovative thinking about gender, sex, and sexuality, who could marry a number of different lenses to create something new. It’s not a strictly academic work by any means; it’s meant to be accessible to people with all sorts of (and no) Jewish backgrounds—hence the glossary in the back. But yeah, there are footnotes. For someone not well-versed in Jewish feminist theory, how transgressive or radical are these essays? Some of them push the envel…

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New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

…nd religious skeptics is widespread and apparently rising according to two new studies, one from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, and the other from a coalition of secularist, atheist, and humanist organizations including the Washington DC-based Center for Inquiry and the London-based International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). Full disclosure: I have worked with both organizations and consulted on the report, titl…

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New Pope Accused of Conspiring in Kidnapping

…. You are the dictatorship!)—today became—“Bergoglio. Basura. Vos sos la dictadura.”  Habemus Papam Franciscum! Check back (or sign up for the newsletter) for a more detailed profile of the new pope.   …

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Size Matters According to New Study

…such nonsense. But in studies like this one, Phrenology’s back again in a new form, implying this time that the size of the brain is any indicator of human intelligence. We’ve all been told countless times that the human brain is a highly redundant organ, and that each of us uses only a fraction of it in normal circumstances. Given that established scientific truism, it would be passing strange if brain size bore any relation to intelligence. An…

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When the ‘Biblical View’ for Evangelicals Was That Life Begins at Birth

…by evangelical publishing houses followed this translation, including the New King James (1982), New Living Translation (1996), and Today’s New International Version (2005). As a proxy for broader scholarly opinion on this re-translation, Smith looks at translations produced since then by non-evangelical Bible publishers. Other Protestant Bibles continued to translate the passage as “miscarriage” or “miscarry,” including the New Revised Standard…

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New Spencer Book Denies Existence of Muhammad

…ience of hadith collection. The Muslims who collected sayings of Muhammad knew that people were making things up and created checks and the best methodology that they could at the time to stop it. Modern scholars are revisiting the existing corpus with new tools and methods.  Why a famous mosque inscription may refer not to Muhammad but, astonishingly, to Jesus. Stumped by this one. No idea what it refers to. How the oldest records referring to a…

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