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New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

…on government ID cards and passports; • religious tests for citizenship or participation in civic life; • religious control of family law; • and religious control of public education. Almost half of the countries of the world have laws or policies that penalize blasphemy, apostasy, contempt of religion, or religious “hate speech,” according to the new analysis by Pew. Of the 198 countries studied, 32 (16%) have anti-blasphemy laws, 20 (10%) have l…

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My Business, Myself: Piercing the Corporate Veil

…mandate, thought it was, finding: General business corporations do not, separate and apart from the actions or belief systems of their individual owners or employees, exercise religion. They do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously-motivated actions separate and apart from the intention and direction of their individual actors. Religious exercise is, by its nature, one of those “purely personal” matters… which is not the…

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Dear White Evangelicals: A Black Square Ain’t Gonna Cut It

…they wish to be treated fairly. It’s exhausting to explain and tiring to unpack. After all, we don’t exactly have a racism-free America to compare it to since, sadly, such a nation has never existed. Besides, how does one person teach another to treat human beings like human beings? But I can tell you without a doubt that a start would have been not being able to count on one hand the number of Black children in my entire Christian school student-…

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Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

…who hears our prayers. But these ultra-devout performers share a peculiar space with a number of other artists whose personal faiths are inconsequential to their public personae but whose fluency in the holy plays out in, well, mysterious ways. Lana Del Rey’s catalogue runs deep with both religious imagery and sentiment; waves of apostasy crash over moments of divine revelation and then reverse course back into faith again. She may have claimed “G…

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Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

…one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or who feels less horrible about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal, which had Boston at its epicenter. That’s a pretty low bar, but of course n…

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8: The Mormon Proposition Gets It Right

…cclesiastical resources were used to leverage “voluntary” and “grassroots” participation from Church members, the stage was set for the kind of dramas of “revelation” and “exposé” the Church now finds itself beset with—played out on movie and television screens across the country.   For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What you sow you shall reap. No matter how carefully Mormon political consultants (some of them paid handsome…

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Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

…political machinations, cultural inspiration, and social movements is a separate reality from the growing number of nones. Both need coverage. But the Gallup data raises questions that I’ve rarely seen addressed in recent years. What does faith look and feel like in flyover country? As a cub reporter, I wrote about the greying mainline, their internecine squabbles and financial woes. But thirty years later, they’re still standing. Did we get it w…

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The Best the Largest Progressive Jewish Org Could Come Up With?

…ess universal, Jewish experiences.  Ironically, this choice is at once too particular, and not particular enough. It excludes many Jews, and perhaps deliberately depicts Jewishness as a secular, American immigration narrative that is accessible to non-Jews as well – such as, importantly, readers of this publication. This is good for building bridges with the wider progressive world and with contemporary immigrant communities, and maybe that’s the…

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