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Church and State in Japan: The Case of the Yasukuni Shrine

By Mark R. Mullins

…the Class-A war criminals enshrined several decades ago. Over the years, a number of individuals have made personal visits to the Yasukuni Shrine and requested that enshrinement be cancelled and the names of their family dead be removed from the shrine register. In addition to appeals from Japanese families, there are also Koreans and Taiwanese who have been dismayed and angered to learn that Yasukuni’s generous enshrinement policy extended even t…

Pious White Reformers and Race, Then and Now

By Peter Laarman

…, by 1810 the term was also being applied to Native Americans. And while a number of enlightened whites believed that the natives of this continent had nobler natures than white people, the problem (again) was that they had been rendered dependent and degraded via their corrupting interactions with lower-class Europeans. Absent an aggressive program of “civilizing” these people, they could not be permitted to remain living cheek-by-jowl with white…

Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

By Peter Laarman

…ars, we’ve doubled the number of private school choice programs to 50, the number of private school choice states to 25, plus Washington, D.C., and doubled the number of students currently benefiting from private school choice to 400,000. All told, together, we’ve helped more than a million kids in private school choice programs, and we’re just getting started. “Just getting started”: we should not underestimate how seriously this should be taken….

Wesolowski Sexual Abuse Case a New Approach or Same Old Same Old?

By Mary E. Hunt

…r in the style to which Wesolowski became accustomed. Multiply that by the number of countries where the Vatican has diplomatic relations. I doubt these diplomatic men cook their own meals or wash their own cassocks, no matter how frugal Pope Francis may be. So somebody pays a lot of money to keep this genteel charade in motion. That “somebody” is rank and file Catholics who have little if any say about where their weekly contributions go. Spoiler…

Atheists Ignore Islamophobia at their Peril

By Chris Stedman

…criticism can easily devolve into unthinking prejudice. I can think of any number of examples from atheist conferences I’ve attended, such as the time I watched with dismay as attendees shouted “show us some ankle” at women wearing burkas for a satirical musical performance, or when a group of fundamentalist Muslim protesters was encircled by a crowd of hundreds of atheist conference attendees shouting things like “go back to the Middle East, you…

Why Religious Exemptions Matter

By Sarah Posner

…le for the exemption. This will, Catholics for Choice argues, increase the number of employees of Catholic organizations who would be deprived of contraception coverage, even if they aren’t Catholic themselves (or are Catholics who dissent from the church’s opposition to birth control). HHS notes in its rule that “the exemption should not exclude group health plans of religious entities that would qualify for the exemption but for the fact that,…

Mormonism’s Black Issues

By Joanna Brooks

…nized as scripture. In the years since the repeal of the priesthood ban, a number of official steps have been taken to correct prejudice within the Church. The Church published a new edition of the Book of Mormon in 1981, replacing a promise that the righteous would become “white” with a promise that they would be made “pure” (2 Nephi 30:6), but leaving intact a handful of other Book of Mormon scriptures correlating dark skin with spiritual accurs…

Pope’s US Visit Provokes Intense Attention; New Vatican Book on Man-Woman Complementarity & New Int’l Report on Christian Role Models for LGBT Equality; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ctor of Sexual Minorities Uganda. “It’s very vague.” Inside the bill are a number of provisions that aim to monitor potential “subversive activities” by NGOs, according to a parliamentary committee report. Among those is a stipulation that would allow the Ugandan government to refuse registering any nonprofit organization if it’s “in the public interest to do so.”’ While the term “public interest” is defined in the Ugandan constitution, human righ…

Why the Church is Struggling to Hold Onto Millennial Catholics

By Kaya Oakes

…tholic faith influences her work. Partially as a response to the dwindling number of young Catholics, the campus ministry group FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students), similarly to Opus Dei, sends missionaries – many of whom are recent college graduates themselves — out to secular college campuses, where they run bible studies and other group activities. A version of the FOCUS handbook on Wikileaks emphasizes adherence to church teachi…

Cruz and the Evangelical Illusion

By Sarah Posner

…“We brought them with no expectations and we were highly pleased with the number who decided Ted is the right man to be of the president of the U.S.” When judging these statements (particularly the words “very diverse,” “significant standing” and “the number”), keep in mind that Barton is known (among evangelicals) for playing fast and loose with facts. Three years ago, the evangelical publisher Thomas Nelson halted publication of one of Barton’s…