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Will Anti-Gay Churches Have Their Tax Exempt Status Revoked?

…ne, and activity. And, despite the vociferous objections to comparisons of today’s anti-gay efforts to segregation, it was, in fact, a fear that the IRS would crack down on racially segregated schools that mobilized the religious right in the 1970s. According to historian Randall Balmer in his book, Thy Kingdom Come, religious right leaders were far more concerned about the IRS’s revocation of the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University over its…

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Mormons’ Puzzling Indifference to Easter

…irst Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. And that’s today.” The elders rolled their eyes at each other. “Where’d you hear that?” one asked. “My Chaucer class,” I said. “The early Christians put Easter as close as possible to a full moon so people could still have light at night to go on pilgrimage.” (FYI: a literature degree can be very useful in writing about religion, and vice versa.) They laughed. “Sister Welker, that may…

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Grace Under Pressure: Reclaiming Hope for Progressive Religion

…through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause. Hope is what led me here today—with a father from Kenya; a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. It is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have the courage to remake the world as it should be. All of which s…

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Don’t Blame Secularism: Reading Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion

…ome specifics about Islam in those parts of the world germane to our lives today. American attitudes towards Iran and Iraq, not to mention our foreign policy choices, would be much more sound if we spent some time learning how to distinguish between Sunni, Shi’a, and Sufi Islam, and about which political movements in Iran and Iraq believe Muslim clerics should run the government versus those that do not. If we had understood those distinctions in…

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The Elite Movement Laying the Foundation for a MAGA That Will Outlast Trump and Remake America: Inside NatCon Part I

…anti-modern flourish, to the rote and tired moral panic that characterizes today’s conservative movement. Each speaker races to outdo the next in offering the most bleak and doom-laden prognosis of the fallen era. “2020,” announces movement founder Yoram Hazony in hushed tones to begin Monday morning’s plenary, “was a watershed year in the history of the United States [and] in the history of the democratic world…a change in [the] political paradig…

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Fear, Guns, and the (Unwinnable) War Against Death: A Letter to My Fellow Americans

…ore. More than that, the nature of everyday life for most of us in America today is deadly for the world around us. The machines that facilitate our daily life exploit the fossil fuel spoils of the underworld, slowly turning the planet into a kind of living hell. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose knew that, even if many of us choose to ignore that it’s happening; phenomena like mass species extinctions are affecting us deeply. Rose argued that in t…

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After Embracing Female Bishop, Pope Spins Again on Women’s Ordination

…e of one of those things being the priesthood? Pope Francis repeated again today his idea of the “feminine dimension” of the Catholic church being represented by Mary, and also said once again that Mary is “more important” to the spirituality of the church than the apostles on Pentecost. What the pope is neglecting to acknowledge, however, is that Pentecost would never have happened if Mary Magdelene hadn’t been the first witness to the resurrecti…

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Of God, But Not God: A Methodist Minister Speaks About Church’s Refusal to Open Its Doors to LGBT

…in a whole series of laws, many of which we pay absolutely no attention to today. Such as? There’s a law that says you can’t wear blends of cotton and linen, or wool and linen. Nobody rails against people wearing blends today. There were very specific reasons for those laws that no longer make sense. In order to understand the reasoning behind “no man shall lie with another man” we have to take into account the fact that at that time they didn’t u…

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RDBook: There is Nothing New About the New Atheism

…lorification of man on the mind. Christopher Lasch’s question is as urgent today as it was when he posed it 18 years ago in his book The True and Only Heaven How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once in for all? Reitan raises in separate chapters the key arguments that atheists have used or attacked, including theories of…

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Blood and Politics — Christian White Nationalism in the Age of Obama

…and they helped create a realignment of forces that continues to plague us today. How does that show itself today? Primarily in the anti-immigrant movement—the lobbyists, Minuteman vigilantes, and racist think tanks that support them. It is here that the idea that the United States is or should be a “White” country takes on the form of a policy issue. If you follow the discussion among anti-immigrant groups, the dominant discourse is about how the…

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