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Rick Warren Busts a Gut Over Cultural Revolution

…r PC society etc.”  The number of supportive and sometimes racist posts outnumber those who advice caution.  I can’t suspect such hideous posts are all from Saddleback membership.  I’m sure quite a number are.  It’s as disturbing as it is disgusting. Warren commented on Tsang’s article, “Thanks so much for teaching us! It was removed instantly.” However, Warren did not get around to posting a formal, public apology until the next day, once again,…

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Growing Up Gay in 666: Fred Phelps in Retrospect

…sees the national attention as a perfect opportunity to shine a light on Phelps and, “help people see how dangerous hate really is.” Our own fears, about ourselves, about those who are different from us, too often take hold and create the circumstances for hate which can destroy families, poison politics and move many to violence. Perhaps a better course is listening to the faith speaking to us each in our own hearts, calling us to reach for our…

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Response to Daniel Philpott: the Politics of Religious Freedom

…learning from our colleagues and exploring these complex histories over a number of years, we have found that religious liberty is not a single, stable principle existing outside of history, as it is often depicted (particularly in policy circles in North America and Europe and by many academics invested in promoting religious freedom). It is, rather, an inescapably context-bound, polyvalent concept unfolding within divergent histories in differi…

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Mormon Tabernacle Choir Will Usher In the Trump Era

…hite evangelicals; the Utah College Exit Poll, however, with a much higher number of Mormon participants, put the number closer to 45 percent. Both figures are well below previous Mormon voting percentages for the Republican candidates, but they indicate that at least half of Latter-day Saints were willing to stomach Trump’s apparent moral deficiencies. This turn of events has historical precedent. Though the LDS Church’s political affiliation was…

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Old Sins Cast Long Shadows: America’s Enduring Fascination with the Ten Commandments

…, there’s a whopper of a story here, I thought; one that went back quite a number of years and that encompassed matters of faith and ritual practice, material culture and daily life as well as the law. I then spent a number of years tracking down, unearthing and interpreting the many iterations of the ancient biblical passages that turned out, much to my surprise and delight, to be just about everywhere in the United States of the late 19th and ea…

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What’s So Troubling About Funding a Playground? How Trinity Lutheran Undermines the First Amendment

…ief revisiting here. A Missouri state program offered grants for a limited number of nonprofit schools and daycares to purchase rubber playground surfaces made from recycled tires. Prospective grantees were evaluated and selected based on a number of factors, including poverty level of the surrounding area and their willingness to generate media exposure for Missouri. In 2012, Trinity Lutheran, a Missouri Synod congregation, applied for the grant…

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Boo! Trump’s Lead With Religious Voters Not As Bigly As You Might Think

…looks to be releasing new information on the Catholic vote on Halloween, a number which often closely tracks the final total of overall voters. It’s also a number that varies quite a bit by the racial breakdown. While Trump wins white Catholics 48-41, he gets absolutely crushed among Hispanics, 84-12. A few back-of-the-envelope calculations put us firmly in “Holy shit” territory. Even assuming a generous 50-50 split of black, Asian, and other Cath…

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Trump with back to camera stands before a frenzied crowd with raised fist.

With ‘Vermin’ Remark Trump Crosses Fully into Nazi Territory

…few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal. If we ever could, we certainly can no longer afford to think that Trump does not matter. He is the presumed nominee of one of America’s two major political part…

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I Was Nearly Seduced by David Brooks’ Reasonable Analysis

…inant models of analysis: number crunching and psychology. Greenspan was a number cruncher, says Brooks, and unfortunately, human psychology caught up with him. Greenspan saw real estate values continuing to soar with no end in sight and allowed himself to be persuaded that they would never stop rising, and certainly would never fall. So he never had to think about petty psychological realities, like a crisis of confidence, never mind an actual pa…

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Ten of Our Favorite Top Tens

…” (CNN/Sojourners town hall 6-26-07). Barack Obama asked a congregation to help him “become an instrument of God” and join him in creating “a Kingdom right here on Earth” (10-17-07). Mike Huckabee tells a crowd: “What we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards” (1-14-08). 6.) TOP TEN COMPARISONS BETWEEN RELIGION AND DENTISTRY: Between Google ads for “oral sedation” and “dental fe…

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