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Religious Opposition To LGBT Equality Softening

…nd other Christians marching together at Pride. In recent years, the small number of Christians who turn up to protest against Pride have been vastly outnumbered by the Christians participating in it. Hill also noted religious support in the UK last April for a new law “to allow religious elements in civil partnerships, while last year the Quakers became the first major Christian denomination to resolve to carry out same-sex marriages.” Even here…

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Mike Johnson isn’t Just Your Average Christian Right Avatar — He’s Influenced by Fringe Movements Unfamiliar to Most Political Analysts

…ite Christian nationalist (and a true believer at that), part of a growing number who see right-wing reactionary Christianity, White supremacy, and authoritarian politics as an integral part of “real” American identity. Those who do not fall under it must submit, or be forced, if need be, through violence. Johnson was elected to the House of Representatives in 2016, after serving two years in the Louisiana state legislature. Before his time in Con…

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To Get Through This Time We’ll Have to Shred the ‘Racial Contract’ and Choose Solidarity Over Sacrifice

…false one. With well over 100,000 deaths as of publication, more than the number of service members killed in World War I, America is living through an apocalyptic moment. But it’s also an apocalypse in the literal sense of an unveiling or disclosure—an unmasking. The coronavirus has unmasked how our lives are marked by a profound mutual dependence that challenges our self-understanding and political ideologies. It has unmasked a federal governme…

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Size Matters According to New Study

…ns of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us.   There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes.  Or perhaps the claim i…

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Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

…basal ganglia, and other brain regions have been proposed to accomplish a number of specific functions.  Imagine, for example, working intently on some task until you notice that your stomach is rumbling and that the daylight has shifted. You think back to when you last ate, gauge how long you’ve been working, and give yourself five minutes to finish up before having a light snack, so as not to ruin your dinner. An MRI scan of this thought proces…

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Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

…be live-streamed, starting Wednesday, June 15). The bishops will take up a number of issues, from the revised liturgy to assisted suicide, but their conversations are sure to be dominated by an issue that has been dogging them since the mid-1980s: sexually abusive priests and the bishops who enabled them. Ten years after Cardinal Bernard Law became the poster bishop for failed religious leadership, new revelations of episcopal misfeasance threaten…

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New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

…gay or lesbian relationships are morally acceptable. Among Catholics, that number jumps to 66%. Protestants still lag behind, but 41% say gay and lesbian relationships are moral. Resorting to pseudo-science is the last gasp of anti-gay groups and they will certainly tout this study, flaws and all, as proof that same-sex couples make awful parents and raise terribly troubled kids. Again, it’s no shock – the religious right wing is always quick to tw…

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U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

…anasia), vocations and ongoing formation (shoring up the rapidly declining number of priests and nuns) and, of course, religious freedom (Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who arranged Kim Davis’ meeting with Pope Francis, received two standing ovations from the bishops.). Then the debate turned to the USCCB’s quadrennial “Faithful Citizenship” voting guide. The bishops had voted earlier to revise the 2007 edition prepared for the 2008 election, whic…

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The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

…han reality. Today, the idealization of Celtic Christianity endures in any number of manifestations, from a community like Iona to the shelves of New Age bookstores. Bradley argues that although the idea of a historical Celtic Church may be an exercise in “wishful thinking, romantic nostalgia and the projection of all kinds of dreams about what should and might be,” it’s also a “vehicle through which people have chased their dreams… of deeper spir…

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Can the Catholic Church Survive Trump?

…administration and the mandate. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2014. And starting around 2012, white Catholics broke for the GOP by historic margins. It’s also worth noting, as Michael Sean Winters has, that this occurred around the time the administrative staff of the bishops’ confer…

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