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Bob McDonnell’s Christian Reconstructionist Thesis

…hile taxation not explicitly endorsed in the Bible is seen as “theft,” the use of tax support and tax supported institutions to promote “biblical families” (among—and at the expense of—those of us who don’t believe in their God, their Bible, or their views of family) is based solely in this circular argument that God has ordained it thus. I am sympathetic to the fact that people’s views change over time (in fact suspicious of people whose views se…

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Bad Scholarship A Poor Solution to Anti-Trans Politics: A Response to the New York Times’ “Is God Transgender?”

…Israel’s conception of gender on the basis of this version of the text because no Israelite ever purposefully wrote this version of the text—it got here accidentally. Maintaining the assumption that there are no typos in the Bible is a fair starting point for rabbinic argument, but Sameth should use that assumption to make interpretations that allow Jewish communities to hold a more expansive views of gender instead of using it to reconstruct the…

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Sharing Many of the Same Flaws as its Subject ‘The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill’ Podcast Puts Blame Anywhere But Where It Belongs

…that cover gender and sex, when women’s voices are given more airtime because those are topics that “concern women,” and yet survivors of abuse are not centered in these discussions. Episode Six—”The Brand”—directly follows the episode that tackles Driscoll’s teachings on sex, but there’s no segue into a discussion of how sex was used as a tool of branding, commodified and packaged to accrue publicity and men’s service to the church. Instead, Cos…

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Religion vs. Science: America’s Perilous Fight

…ht. Teaching ID as science violated the Constitution, the court ruled, because ID promotes religion and the Establishment Clause requires that the government remain neutral on religious issues. If Richard Dawkins was right about evolution disproving God, then teaching evolution presumably would also violate the Constitution. He should temper his claims, especially given the limitations inherent in any effort to use science either to prove or to di…

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Islam in Conflict with Democracy? A Response to Stanley Fish

…seeks as a religion,” only heightens this possibility. It also further confuses matters because it ignores the differences between two very different religious cultures, the United States and Britain. The United States remains a proudly religious nation, while Britain is significantly more modest in its observance and public expression of religion. This much is bothersome as a wide range of culture warriors, from those who insist that this is a “C…

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Legacy of Eugenics and Racism Can’t Be Ignored

…insights into the relationship between nature and divinity. Bishop Curry’s use of Teilhard’s vision of “fire” at the Royal Wedding comes largely from The Mass on the World, completed in 1923! Sadly, it also seems indisputable that the mature formulations of some of Teilhard’s most famous ideas—e.g., the Noosphere, the Omega Point, the divinization of the species—rest upon philosophies infused with conceptions of eugenics, racial superiority, steri…

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Eyes on the Prize, Rainbow People! A Post-DOMA Challenge

…therwise compelling story about the need for queer people to make common cause with low-wage workers. She and her spouse are small-time farmers in the Central Valley: in that context they can feel how wrong it would be for them to say “thank you very much” to the Supremes and then proceed to ignore the economic struggles of their neighbors. But the phrase “saved the best for last” thoughtlessly suggests that the other SCOTUS decisions bearing on t…

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Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

…d preferred mercy, amnesty and forgiveness over force (though Muhammad did use force, and at times that use of force shocks). And, as noted earlier, slavery has ended. So many Muslim religious voices have endorsed or accepted abolition that it’s become one of the few things on which an entire religious tradition agrees, and which unanimity is endorsed by Islamic law as equal in force to its most sacred judgments. Muslim scholars have issued collec…

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My Childhood Hobby Was Satanic, Or So They Told Me

…ntroversies surrounding monuments. I’m interested in the way monuments are used to inscribe particular histories and ideas of polity onto the land. I’m also interested in the way rituals are used to construct and change those meanings. The connection between ritual, sacred space, and narrative runs through a lot of my work. In my next book I plan to look at some of the controversies surrounding monuments in America in order to explore how and why…

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Reexamining the Shaky Theology That Gives Humans ‘Dominion’ Over All Creation

…n this story? Is it, as the dominionist interpretation argues, a matter of use value? Are animals and the rest of creation there for humankind to use, a bounteous gift of “natural resources”? The fact that, after each stage of creation, God declares that it is all “good,” in and of itself, without reference to humans, already suggests otherwise. Not once does God say “The humans are going to love this! I can’t wait to see what they do with it.” In…

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