Archives

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    Not Too Mormon

    Conventional wisdom in the last election cycle held that Mitt Romney could never win the hearts of America’s conservative evangelicals—the Republican base—because he’s Mormon, and evangelicals don’t consider Mormons to be properly Christian. “I don’t believe conservative Christians will vote […]

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    Our State of Disgrace

    A new religion book and the mosque. While researching their forthcoming book about American religion, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues polled on this hypothetical question: Say a group of Buddhists wanted to build a large temple […]

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    Fiddling While Christianity Burns

    Pope Benedict is hitting all the wrong notes in his trip to the United Kingdom. Ireland, where the Roman Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal has been the most appalling—hundreds of children molested over decades—is a short plane ride from England. And […]

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    The Other Religion at Ground Zero

    A Greek Orthodox congregation has been waiting longer—and working harder—than Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to restore the church that was destroyed on September 11, 2001. Father Mark Arey won’t put it quite this way, but he doesn’t see why Muslims […]

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    The Misinformants

    What ‘stealth jihad’ doesn’t mean. Here is the latest semantic assault from the party that brought you “Islamo-facism” (circa 2005) and “Axis of Evil” (2002). The term “stealth jihad” is suddenly voguish among politically ambitious right wingers who see President […]

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    Religious Pluralism at Ground Zero?

    If President Obama wants to convince Americans to support the ‘Ground Zero mosque’ he needs to tie it to our personal tolerance for other faiths. With his remarks last week in support of “the mosque at Ground Zero” and his rather lame […]

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    War Over Ground Zero

    A proposed mosque tests the limits of American tolerance. They have almost everything in common, including the tragedy that defines their lives. Both women were born in the Bronx and educated in Catholic schools. They married and raised kids of […]

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    No Atheists in Foxholes

    And other myths of the recession. Every day, the economist Daniel Hungerman looks at the graph that hangs above his desk at the University of Notre Dame. One jagged line goes down and up. This is America’s gross domestic product […]

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    The Cost of Being Jewish

    How the recession affects religion. It sounds like a Catskills-era joke with a Jewish lawyer in the punchline, but among Jewish leaders it’s deadly serious. Why does it cost so much to be Jewish? At a time when American families […]

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    Belgium Bucks the Vatican

    The Vatican has clearly stated that when investigating cases of sex abuse, “civil law concerning the reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed.” History shows, however, that such cooperation is not always the norm. For more […]

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