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Karen Armstrong Weighs In On God
The latest salvo in the war between the atheists and the believers comes from the doyenne of religious intellectual history, Karen Armstrong. Her tone is one of high-minded irritation. Her argument is compelling. To oversimplify: “faith” and “reason” are not like political parties. You don’t join one after having been convinced via argument of its
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Secret Religious Group Gathering Political Power
There is a secret organization of powerful Christians in Washington. Only don’t call it “secret,” its defenders say. Call it “private.” Or “below the radar.” And it’s not an organization, more like a global informal network of friends, or, as one of its leaders described it, “a group of people brought together by a common
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Ted Kennedy: His Faith, His Life
As little children, they went to mass each week, and every day in the summertime. “We always had a rosary on our beds; and then, of course, [Mother would] hear our bedtime prayers and do our catechism with us,” said Patricia, the sixth of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children, in her mother’s memoir, Times
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Who cares about the Episcopal Church?
The general convention of the Episcopal Church ended last month in Anaheim, Calif., with a whimper, despite these rather staggering announcements: it would, after years of internal battling, continue to elevate gay priests to bishops, and it would consider blessing same-sex unions in the states that allow gays and lesbians to marry. The convention—and these
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We Are All Hindus Now
America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that’s the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus
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Is NIH Director Francis Collins Disqualified By His Faith
I do not believe that the Christian faith of Dr. Francis Collins, recently nominated to run the National Institutes of Health, disqualifies him from that job. The only questions that need be asked of Collins are these: Is he a good enough scientist? And will he be a passionate and relentless advocate for science and
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The Radical Left versus Obama
Last week, as President Obama was announcing his pick for surgeon general—a Roman Catholic African-American and MacArthur “genius” award winner who has spent her career caring for the poor on Alabama’s Gulf Coast—I was on the phone with the Princeton professor and public intellectual Cornel West. He was reiterating his complaint, which he had aired
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Every Man’s Battle by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker
When it came out in 2000, Every Man’s Battle was an instant sensation. Written by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, two evangelical Christians, it brought the subject of male lust into the open. Men, the book said—even Christian men—were dogs. They ogled women, they dreamed about cheating on their wives. They read porn. They masturbated.
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✴︎ Newsweek
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Bob and Ralph Brown Crossing Atlantic for Christ
Their wives, it should be said at the outset, do not entirely approve: Bob and Ralph Brown, two 50-something brothers, are planning to steer their 21-foot flats boat—a motorized fiberglass raft—across the Atlantic Ocean to honor three Marines who died for their country nearly 30 years ago. The boat has a canopy roof, but no