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In the contraception furor, the loud voices of a few threaten revolutionary gains of all U.S. women
The Obama administration may have wriggled out of a tight spot when it announced it would require insurers – and not some religiously based employers, as it previously indicated – to provide no-cost birth control to employees. But the furor hasn’t died down yet, and amid all the election-year politicking and claims of trampled religious freedoms, the revolutionary gains
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Rethinking the soul as the ’Net becomes more lifelike
The question occurred to me as I spent an hour browsing the Web, and on inspection, it seemed to me not entirely nutty. Technology is changing the way we think about all kinds of theological concepts, such as community, prayer, ritual and worship. Why should it not expand our definition of “soul”? What a soul
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Is Romney nicer because he’s Mormon?
Mitt Romney’s tax returns prompt this question. According to those documents, which he released recently, Romney gives at least 10 percent of his earnings of about $20 million a year to the Mormon Church. He tithes, in other words, in accordance with the expectations of his church’s leaders and the biblical command from Leviticus: “All tithes from
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For Santorums, personal tragedy turned political
Haunting the political landscape is the ghost (or soul or spirit or memory or image, depending on how you see these things) of Gabriel Michael Santorum. Born at 19 gestational weeks, too young to live outside the uterus, Gabriel died within two hours. The story is well known. In October 1996, Karen Santorum underwent surgery
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Who owns yoga?
The video, three minutes long and posted just a week ago, is tearing up the Internet, causing appreciative reactions among heterosexual men and some yoga fans and disapproval among yoga purists. Shot in the penthouse of the Mondrian SoHo hotel in New York, it shows a gorgeous young woman performing expert yoga moves wearing only a
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An Ism Is Born
Are we all secretly kid-haters at heart? To the tally of those requiring protection from the constant, corrosive prejudice of the dominant culture, another group must now be added. It turns out that American children—whose wants and whims support untold industries and whose very existence causes property taxes to rise in the neighborhood of a
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The new evangelical vote
White evangelical voters just aren’t as predictable as they used to be. That’s the news out of Iowa – and it’s bound to be reflected in Republican primary results all over the country. The most interesting poll data from the Iowa caucuses are these: Mitt Romney won in the cities. Rick Santorum won in the rural areas. In Iowa, where the
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Finding meaning beyond the Christmas bows, bells and baby Jesus
One year, I tried to skip Christmas. I was 30 and single. I lived alone. My family of origin doesn’t celebrate the birth of Jesus, and I’d spent enough Christmas mornings with other people’s families, opening a token gift from Santa, to find no novelty there. So I heeded the directives I’d read in a
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How to be Jewish at Christmas
I think of the Jews of the Beit Alpha synagogue as I sit here in my New York City apartment, watching our Christmas tree being hoisted, the boxes of lights and ornaments in heaps, the child scampering in excitement, orchestrating, advising — kibitzing, as my father would say. I cannot imagine that the 6th-century men of the