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The Pope and Social Media: A Digital Counter-Reformation?

…age crafted outside the immediate experience of the audience, social media today is by its nature participatory, interactive, collaborative, distributive, and, importantly, integrated deeply into the day-to-day experience of users. Updating a Facebook status or tweeting a question about the nature of the Trinity (it happens!) is not a break in the action, an interruption of demands of daily life. These activities are intimate parts of contemporary…

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Why Kaepernick’s Refusal to Stand Is an Act of Religious Dissent

…ervescence,” could lead individuals to act with emotional abandon, what we today might call extremism. To threaten the totem, particularly in front of large groups (such as on national television!), is to call into question the foundations of society. “When a belief is shared unanimously by a people, to touch it—that is, to deny or question it—is forbidden,” Durkheim wrote. People kill or die for their symbols: The soldier who dies for his flag di…

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Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

…was not at all good. The Jews who first conceived of heaven as we know it today were under assault, literally, from their Greek rulers. Christians, at the beginning, were a marginal band, derided by the pagan majority. Islam was established in a uniquely inhospitable part of the world by people who hoped to rectify the social order: to turn the “have nots” into “haves.” For all these groups, heaven—a very specific heaven—was a reward for staying…

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A History of the Unaffiliated: How the “Spiritual Not Religious” Gospel Has Spread

…favor of Darwinism, psychology, and comparative religions. The majority of today’s religious “nones”—those who claim no religion but still embrace spirituality—are engaged in the same task of renovating their faith for a new historical moment. And typically, they draw from this same liberal religious toolkit. Today’s unaffiliated, like the liberals of previous generations, typically shun dogma and creed in favor of a faith that is practical, psych…

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Dilemmas of American Empire: Can Obama Pull Off a Game-Changer in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan?

…Natanz with a nuclear weapon until the Joint Chiefs rebelled against them. Today there is a serious possibility that the Netanyahu government in Israel will carry out the bombing option. If it does, the entire region could explode into a ball of fire. That’s the apocalyptic scenario. The hopeful one is a game-changer based on two or three years of sustained diplomacy. The U.S. could declare that it recognizes the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic…

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More Pressure on Obama to Fix His Religious Freedom Legacy

…Vision Memo, has thus attracted a larger coalition. Organizations signing today’s letter include Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union, a number of Christian Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, secular, and atheist groups, as well as legal advocates, abortion rights advocates, and LGBT groups. According to the letter, the World Vision Memo is based “on flawed legal analysis and wrongly asserts that R…

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Rallies Honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s Support of Organized Labor

…ckelberry was one of the men who marched alongside King during the strike. Today, Mr. Nickelberry, 79, is still hauling Memphis’ garbage, as he has done for more than 55 years. I wrote about Nickelberry in September: Like his fellow sanitation workers back then, he heaved rusted cans over his head. Wet garbage and maggots leaked down his collar and the back of his shirt. There of riding the bus home and people complaining that he smelled because t…

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Pious White Reformers and Race, Then and Now

…Jedidiah Morse, Jeremiah Evarts, Robert Finley, and Isaac McCoy. We speak today of the fecklessness of white liberals, and I certainly am among those who have decried, in these pages and elsewhere, the special fecklessness of white Christian progressives when it comes to the hardcore issues of race and class. The difference between today’s progressives and the “benevolent” reformers of 200 years ago is that those pious reformers actually had the…

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Same-Sex Marriage May Lead to Polygamy, But So What?

…ess to divorce and suffrage. While the stakes are not exactly the same for today’s debates over polygamy, there’s quite a bit of rhetorical and political continuity between the nineteenth-century anti-polygamy cause and today’s. Claims that same-sex marriage and polygamy are social experiments that will adversely affect children serve to limit women’s (and other people’s) options. Sheff discovered, for instance, that triads with one woman and two…

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Old Politics, New Bedfellows: The Olson/Boies Challenge to Prop. 8

…rganizing and firepower that progressives will need to defeat conservatism today. To be sure, there are cleavages within the conservative movement. Some cultural conservatives are willing to support contraception and comprehensive sex-ed in the name of reducing the need for abortion. Some hawks who supported the Iraq war nevertheless oppose torture and executive secrecy. And many fiscal conservatives are as disgusted with the lack of transparency…

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