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The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

…dits and anchors is the work to stave off the eureka moment. To refuse the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle; the piece that would explain so many of the contradictions. A world of Muslim bans, dissidents taken away in unmarked vehicles, castigation and public denouncement of the Lügenpresse, a senior policy advisor dedicated to stamping out a secret plan for white demographic replacement, and a threatened American Nuremberg rally held on Juneteenth…

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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…

…ion or function of the brain, it must not be real. The article points to a number of ways neuropsychology has been overinterpreted and oversold. 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…

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New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

…ouse, and his colleague, Rob Tisinai, gives a better breakdown of what the numbers really mean—and it isn’t a rousing success story about “change.” “Out of 98 highly-motivated subjects, the authors found that a small, unspecified number can use prayer and counseling to shut down their sexual feelings or become a bit more bi. And possibly none who turned straight.” Even the researchers call their conclusions “overly optimistic.” “These results do n…

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

…perhaps encounter a faith that seems naturally separate from the arid scholasticism and harsh rulings of the orthodox, even if that faith is more imagined than real. And yet, despite there being some expected variation between Celtic and the rest of Europe’s Christianity, there’s no substantial theological difference between the Roman Catholic Church of the period and its Irish, Scottish, and Welsh believers. Until the Synod of Whitby in 664, the…

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

…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, especially privileged white women, are becoming overcivilized and unnatural, not having as many privileged white babies, relying on technology and pain relief, and not fi…

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Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

…enaissance on. Gustave Moreau’s 1864 painting Oedipus and the Sphinx is a classic of symbolist art, depicting the Theban king assailed by a feminine monster at once seductive and deadly. The surrealists, including Picasso, were known for engaging mythic imagery, and were particularly intrigued by composite beasts such as the sphinx. Argentine painter Leonor Fini created numerous variations on the Greek sphinx, while Salvador Dalí concocted a verit…

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Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

…mple truth that religious and sexual identities at times clash, that such clashes can cause suffering, and that not all people resolve that clash in favor of sexual identity. But, after years of studying and writing about reparative therapy and the ex-gay movement, and after reading Rich Wyler’s own account of his sexual conversion, I found NPR’s story, and Schumacher-Matos’ defense of it, shallow and dispiriting. Married with Children There is mu…

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From Licking Floors to Praying for an Inept Government, Churches React to C-19

…ciety, among the most physically intimate, and likely include the greatest number of vulnerable people. Even single members of large congregations can have a dramatic effect on how coronavirus spreads or doesn’t, as South Korea found out the hard way. While many aren’t meeting at all or are streaming services, some churches that do meet feel like they need to support those who need it, in worship or otherwise. My mother’s congregation in Madison,…

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The Year of the Abusive Priest

…les J. Scicluna, represented sexual abuse cases that had occurred over the last fifty years. Unfortunately, this is a very small percentage of the cases worldwide, in part because Scicluna states that between 1975 and 1985, “I do not believe that any cases of pedophilia committed by priests were brought to the attention of our Congregation.” What he’s saying here is that they never saw the extent of these cases because they were handled on the dio…

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