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Turn On The News: This Isn’t a Split, It’s a Tiny Sliver of Conservatives Walking Out the Door — Introducing A New Media Criticism Column

…mpanion kept 95.7% of it.) It’s possible this is part of a larger trend. A number of paragraphs down there’s mention of a long-delayed vote on the future of the denomination, which might lend credibility to the headline, but no details are given, so it’s not possible to evaluate the claim. Likewise, near the top of the story comes a paragraph with a quote from an RCA pastor about the financial difficulties this will create. Does he speak for the d…

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How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

…of the whole. Noll even ends the collection with yet another metaphorical flourish, suggesting that scholars no longer think of evangelicalism as a religious “World Series,” where events in the United States determine a victor, but as a “World Cup,” where an international diversity of teams are on display. There’s a certain irony here, in that an Anglophone movement that once saw itself as uniquely positioned to save the world is now looking to t…

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Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

…ark change from the immediate post-Soviet period. Recent years have seen a flurry of church construction throughout the country. And perhaps most important of all, there’s a committed believer—Vladimir Putin—in the Kremlin, a man who surrounds himself with other influential people of faith and regularly invokes God in his public statements. Yet all is not as rosy for the Orthodox Church as it appears on the surface. The blurring of the line betwee…

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New Poll Reveals That Anti-Trans Rhetoric isn’t Just Affecting Republicans and White Evangelicals

…corresponding figures for them are 73% and 71%, the trend remaining almost flat and perhaps going down. The trend also remained flat among Jewish Americans (44%), but got worse among the religiously unaffiliated, leaping from 38% to 46%. While the understanding of gender as strictly binary or as nonbinary may not be a perfect indicator of trans acceptance overall, given the prominent place of the binary in anti-trans rhetoric, I think these attitu…

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The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

…damentally post-racist country, the racists “are just a few idiots,” not a number tallied in the millions. In “conservatism,” the intellectual legacy of the Confederacy has been normalized and an entire population of Negrophobes is absorbed into society and allowed space to push their anti-Black agenda everywhere from the Senate floor to bank cubicles. It’s been said that politics is the continuation of war by other means. After the surrender at A…

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LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

…ave asserted the Christianity of Mormon belief for national audiences, the number one reaction has come from Christians who seek to correct my understanding of my faith and remind me that Mormons are not, in their eyes, Christians. Some assert that they’ll be praying for my mistaken soul (and the soul of my Jewish husband too). Others seek to engage in a friendlier conversational exchange about whether Mormons profess the Nicene Creed. (We do not…

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Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

…. Rosenbaum addresses the fetishizing of fMRI images, the ideology that conflates causation and correlation, and the shifting semantics — evil recast as “non-empathy” by one esteemed psychologist (echoing, interestingly, the traditional Christian understanding of evil as a privation). But it’s the image of scientists as priests that caught my attention. It’s an image that has a lot going for it. Before I say what exactly it has going for it, howev…

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New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

…ications, however, will stop the religious right from totally blowing this flawed research up into the proof it needs that you can “pray away the gay.” Aside from the obviously flawed methodology and the laughably small sample size, the biggest problem with this study is that all of the “therapy” given to these 98 poor souls was religiously-based—and more specifically evangelical Christian. The power of religious belief to sway one’s behavior cann…

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

…teach us. Caitlin Corning explains in The Celtic and Roman Traditions: Conflict and Consensus in the Early Medieval Church that, even though at one point historians may have had a romantic attachment to the idea, more recently “scholars have abandoned the term Celtic Church believing it to be too closely associated with inaccurate ideas.” However, as her study makes clear, the general public is in no way allergic to this constructed history given…

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“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

…ein women’s reproductive organs exist for a clearly-discernible purpose, reflecting a sacred and beneficent design. Starting Over So, anyway, that’s where we are. The notion that pregnancy is not an illness draws, I daresay uneasily, from a number of sources. There’s the classical notion that a thing’s nature is derived from its purpose, and the purpose of female bodies is to bear children. There’s the persistent early modern fear that women, espe…

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