tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40475145095522943432024-03-13T00:11:39.989-04:00Religious Studies ForumThis blog is intended to promote a continuous, unbiased discussion of matters related to Religious Studies as an academic discipline. If you would like to pose a topic for discussion or present a particular question, then please feel free to add a comment to the last post published that relates to your particular topic/question. If you are uncomfortable with the prospect of exposure, then there is an "Anonymous" option available to all contributors.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.comBlogger1145125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-67106626693889802972014-01-17T19:44:00.000-05:002014-01-17T19:44:23.061-05:00Atheist group’s prison book project aims to turn inmates against God<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Douglas Ernst ("The Washington Times," January 15, 2014)</div>
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A humanist advocacy group has launched a book project designed to provide inmates with an atheist-based alternative to religious literature distributed in prisons.</div>
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The Freethought Books Project was began in December by the Center for Inquiry. Members of the group have made a concerted effort to collect and donate material to counter biblical teaching given to convicts.</div>
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“The project offers donated books on atheism, humanism, science, and skepticism to prisoners who seek alternatives to the religious proselytizing and indoctrination that is often unavoidable within the prison system,” states a press release announcing the project. “It will also connect inmates with volunteer pen pals at CFI branches with whom they can connect and share ideas.”</div>
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Steve Wells, author of “The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible,” donated copies of his book to the project.</div>
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“We think it’s important to provide an alternative to the Bibles and other religious materials that are continually pushed upon prison inmates,” he said.</div>
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Members of the Center for Inquiry aren’t the only ones participating. Individuals who know of the project of purchased atheist literature off an Amazon Wish List that was set up to promote the initiative, according to The Blaze.</div>
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“By providing books, as well as connections through the pen pal network, we offer prisoners much-needed ties to the outside world and open minds to the wonders of science and critical thinking,” project coordinator Sarah Kaiser told the Christian Post.</div>
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Since the initiative launched in December, 45 inmates have reportedly requested books from the Center for Inquiry, according to the Post.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-76599200030955106342014-01-17T19:42:00.000-05:002014-01-17T19:42:05.373-05:00Muslim Women Challenge American Mosques: 'Now Is The Time'<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Monique Parsons ("NPR," January 15, 2014)</div>
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Most American mosques do a poor job of including women, according to a recent study co-sponsored by the Islamic Society of North America. Sometimes that means subpar women's prayer spaces, a lack of leadership roles or little programming relevant to women.</div>
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For Edina Lekovic, a recent visit to a mosque meant being asked to use a separate entrance from the one men use. Lekovic works for the Muslim Public Affairs Council and sits on a regional Islamic advisory board in Southern California. She goes to mosques a lot for meetings and Friday prayers.</div>
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"I was walking towards the front door only to be told by a boy of no more than 12 years old — he pointed to the side of the building and said, 'Oh, the sisters' entrance is over there,' " she says.</div>
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Lekovic is religious: She covers her hair and doesn't mind praying separately from men as is Islamic custom. But entering through a different door? "And I sort of stopped dead in my tracks and looked around for an adult figure that I could have the conversation with," she says.</div>
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Nobody else was around. "So I looked at this 12-year-old boy and said, 'There's a separate entrance for women? Why is that?' just to see what he would say, and he sort of shrugged his shoulders and said, 'It just is,' " she says.</div>
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Lekovic is also a teacher, and she decided to seize the moment. "My final response to him was, 'Well, the mosque that I go to on the other side of town has everybody walk through the same set of doors,' " she says.</div>
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Lekovic says there was a time she might have slipped in the side entrance, quietly fuming. But things are changing. Just a few years ago, a woman's place in the mosque was a fringe issue.</div>
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"There was to some degree pushback around this, like, 'We're dealing with enough challenges right now,' that you know, 'Wait your turn' was kind of the attitude," Lekovic says. "Today more and more women are saying, 'Now is the time.' "</div>
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Lekovic says there is a rich history of Islamic teachings that preach equality for women. But she also gives credit to a 34-year-old Chicago woman named Hind Makki. Last year, Makki started an online project called Side Entrance, where women from around the world share photos of their prayer spaces. Not all the photos are negative. Submissions range from isolated, moldy storerooms to soaring, lushly carpeted halls.</div>
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"The tag line is: 'We showcase the beautiful, the adequate and the pathetic,' " says Makki.</div>
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The project began when she snapped photos of women's prayer spaces in some Chicago mosques and posted them on her Facebook page. One showed women praying behind a tall room divider, blocking views; another looked like a walk-in closet with a curtain-covered window. The photos went viral.</div>
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"I got a lot of response, and one of the most interesting type of responses I got was from men who had no clue," Makki says.</div>
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While some accused her of airing dirty laundry, many Muslim men started asking how they could help.</div>
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"They just had no idea that this was somewhat typical of women's experiences at a mosque — that you go to a mosque and you don't see a dome; you don't see the imam, certainly; you don't see the architecture — you see a big wall in front of you," she says.</div>
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Shahina Saeed is on the board of directors of the Islamic Society of Orange County, one of the oldest and largest mosques in Southern California.</div>
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"I'm surprised that in a big city like Chicago there's a place like that where the women can't even see what's going on in front of them. I would not be comfortable in a space like that," she says.</div>
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At the Islamic Society of Orange County, women pray in a big loft with an outdoor patio and views of the imam and the mosque's colorful glass dome. They can also pray on the main floor in an area beside the men. Saeed says she feels at home here. The Islamic Society of North America study found that more women showed up for events at mosques like hers: those with female board members, female speakers and attractive women's prayer spaces.</div>
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Lekovic says this conversation is about more than side entrances.</div>
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"Part of what's at stake is the question of where Muslim women will put their talents. Now, if the mosque is an environment in which they see that the fruits of their labor will be beneficial to the community, they will put their time and energy there," she says.</div>
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National Muslim leaders are paying attention. The Islamic Society of North America is urging mosques to recruit more female board members, and a recent conference centered on a campaign to improve women's prayer spaces.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-70997098799344839872014-01-17T19:39:00.001-05:002014-01-17T19:39:31.713-05:00Margaret Thatcher gave full support over Golden Temple raid, letter shows<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Phil Miller ("The Guardian," January 15, 2014)</div>
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Margaret Thatcher gave her Indian counterpart Indira Gandhi Britain's full support in the immediate aftermath of the 1984 Golden Temple raid, according to private correspondence seen by the Guardian.</div>
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The then British prime minister sent a personal note saying that Britain supported India's unity in the face of demands for a separate Sikh homeland and disclosed that police were investigating threats against the safety of Indian diplomats.</div>
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The letter will cause further debate about Britain's role in the raid among the worldwide Sikh community and senior MPs across the political spectrum after it was disclosed on Monday that the Indian government had made an apparent request for advice from the SAS in the months leading up to the raid.</div>
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It will form part of an investigation launched by the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, on the orders of David Cameron to determine the British government's actions over the raid on Sikhism's holiest site in Amritsar.</div>
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The Indian government says about 400 people were killed when Gandhi sent troops into the temple complex in June 1984 in the six-day Operation Blue Star. Sikh groups, which have called for an inquiry into the British role in "one of the darkest episodes in Sikh history", put the death toll in the thousands, including many pilgrims.</div>
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In what appears to be the first letter to Gandhi after the raid, sent on 30 June 1984, Thatcher wrote: "These have been anxious weeks for you, involving difficult decisions. I have followed closely your efforts to restore calm there, and I very much hope that the 'healing touch' for which you have called will open the way to a peaceful and prosperous future in that troubled region."</div>
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The letter, which is in response to two sent by Gandhi on 9 and 14 June, appears to show that the Indian prime minister had expressed worries that Sikh "extremists" could use Britain as a base. Thatcher wrote: "I well appreciate your concern about the potential security threat posed by extremists outside India. We are determined not to allow our traditional freedoms to be abused by those who seek to use violence for political ends."</div>
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In an apparent reference to death threats against Gandhi which had been reported in the British media, the UK prime minister who died last year wrote: "We have made sure the police are aware of these statements and they are investigating them."</div>
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Thatcher also reassured Gandhi that British police were "devoting considerable resources" to safeguarding Indian government personnel in Britain.</div>
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A few months after the letter was sent, Gandhi was gunned down by her own Sikh bodyguards in a claimed act of revenge. This triggered communal violence which led to the deaths of thousands of Sikhs across India.</div>
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Other documents in the file make clear Whitehall's interest in lucrative arms sales to India at this time. A secret Foreign Office briefing dated 22 June 1984, which was sent to Downing Street, stressed that British "commercial interests" in India were "very substantial. It it a large and growing market for both commercial and defence sales. British exports in 1983 exceeded £800m and since 1975 India has bought British defence equipment worth over £1.25bn," the document claims.</div>
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Cameron on Wednesday appeared to downplay the likelihood of an inquiry finding evidence that Britain was to blame for the raid. Labour's former deputy chairman Tom Watson suggested the British might have played a part in the assault on the temple in exchange for the Indians agreeing to purchase a fleet of helicopters in a £65m deal.</div>
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Watson said to Cameron: "On your Amritsar inquiry, instead of ordering the civil servants to investigate, why don't you just ask lords Geoffrey Howe and Leon Brittan what they agreed with Margaret Thatcher, and whether it had anything to do with the Westland Helicopter deal at the time?" Cameron dismissed any suggestions of a conspiracy.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-61746373310515812892013-12-21T21:37:00.001-05:002013-12-21T21:37:54.937-05:00Pope and the devil: Francis’ fascination with Satan leads to suspicion he performed exorcism<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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(AP, May 21, 2013)</div>
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Vatican City — Pope Francis’ fascination with the devil took on remarkable new twists Tuesday, with a well-known exorcist insisting Francis helped “liberate” a Mexican man possessed by four different demons despite the Vatican’s insistence that no such papal exorcism took place.</div>
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The case concerns a 43-year-old husband and father who traveled to Rome from Mexico to attend Francis’ Mass on Sunday in St. Peter’s Square. At the end of the Mass, Francis blessed several wheelchair-bound faithful as he always does, including a man possessed by the devil, according to the priest who brought him, the Rev. Juan Rivas.</div>
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Francis laid his hands on the man’s head and recited a prayer. The man heaved deeply a half-dozen times, shook, then slumped in his wheelchair.</div>
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The images, broadcast worldwide, prompted the television station of the Italian bishops’ conference to declare that according to several exorcists, there was “no doubt” that Francis either performed an exorcism or a simpler prayer to free the man from the devil.</div>
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The Vatican was more cautious. In a statement Tuesday, it said Francis “didn’t intend to perform any exorcism. But as he often does for the sick or suffering, he simply intended to pray for someone who was suffering who was presented to him.”</div>
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The Rev. Gabriele Amorth, a leading exorcist for the diocese of Rome, said he performed a lengthy exorcism of his own on the man Tuesday morning and ascertained he was possessed by four separate demons. The case was related to the legalization of abortion in Mexico City, he said.</div>
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Amorth told RAI state radio that even a short prayer, without the full rite of exorcism being performed, is in itself a type of exorcism.</div>
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“That was a true exorcism,” he said of Francis’ prayer. “Exorcisms aren’t just done according to the rules of the ritual.”</div>
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Rivas took the Vatican line, saying it was no exorcism but that Francis merely said a prayer to free the man from the devil.</div>
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“Since no one heard what he said, including me who was right there, you can say he did a prayer for liberation but nothing more,” Rivas wrote on his Facebook page, which was confirmed by his religious order, the Legionaries of Christ.</div>
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Fueling the speculation that Francis did indeed perform an exorcism is his frequent reference to Satan in his homilies — as well as an apparent surge in demand for exorcisms among the faithful despite the irreverent treatment the rite often receives from Hollywood.</div>
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Who can forget the green vomit and the spinning head of the possessed girl in the 1973 cult classic “The Exorcist”?</div>
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In his very first homily as pope on March 14, Francis warned cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel the day after he was elected that “he who doesn’t pray to the Lord prays to the devil.”</div>
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He has since mentioned the devil on a handful of occasions, most recently in a May 4 homily when in his morning Mass in the Vatican hotel chapel he spoke of the need for dialogue — except with Satan.</div>
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“With the prince of this world you can’t have dialogue: Let this be clear!” he warned.</div>
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Experts said Francis’ frequent invocation of the devil is a reflection both of his Jesuit spirituality and his Latin American roots, as well as a reflection of a Catholic Church weakened by secularization.</div>
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“The devil’s influence and presence in the world seems to fluctuate in quantity inversely proportionate to the presence of Christian faith,” said the Rev. Robert Gahl, a moral theologian at Rome’s Pontifical Holy Cross University. “So, one would expect an upswing in his malicious activity in the wake of de-Christianization and secularization” in the world and a surge in things like drug use, pornography and superstition.</div>
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In recent years, Rome’s pontifical universities have hosted several courses for would-be exorcists on the rite, updated in 1998 and contained in a little red leather-bound booklet. The rite is relatively brief, consisting of blessings with holy water, prayers and an interrogation of the devil in which the exorcist demands to know the devil’s name, how many are present and when they will leave the victim.</div>
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Only a priest authorized by a bishop can perform an exorcism, and canon law specifies that the exorcist must be “endowed with piety, knowledge, prudence and integrity of life.”</div>
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While belief in the devil is consistent with church teaching, the Holy See does urge prudence, particularly to ensure that the victim isn’t merely psychologically ill.</div>
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The Rev. Giulio Maspero, a Rome-based systematic theologian who has witnessed or participated in more than a dozen exorcisms, says he’s fairly certain that Francis’ prayer on Sunday was either a full-fledged exorcism or a more simple prayer to “liberate” the young man from demonic possession.</div>
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He noted that the placement of the pope’s hands on the man’s head was the “typical position” for an exorcist to use.</div>
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“When you witness something like that — for me it was shocking — I could feel the power of prayer,” he said in a phone interview, speaking of his own previous experiences.</div>
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The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, sought to temper speculation that what occurred was a full-fledged exorcism. While he didn’t deny it outright — he said Francis hadn’t “intended” to perform one — he stressed that the intention of the person praying is quite important.</div>
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Late Tuesday, the director of TV2000, the television of the Italian bishops’ conference, went on the air to apologize for the earlier report.</div>
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“I don’t want to attribute to him a gesture that he didn’t intend to perform,” said the director, Dino Boffo.</div>
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That said, Francis’ actions and attitude toward the devil are not new: As archbishop of Buenos Aires, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio frequently spoke about the devil in our midst.</div>
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In the book “Heaven and Earth,” Bergoglio devoted the second chapter to “The Devil” and said in no uncertain terms that he believes in the devil and that Satan’s fruits are “destruction, division, hatred and calumny.”</div>
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“Perhaps its greatest success in these times has been to make us think that it doesn’t exist, that everything can be traced to a purely human plan,” he wrote.</div>
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Italian newspapers noted that the late Pope John Paul II performed an exorcism in 1982 — near the same spot where Francis prayed over the young disabled man Sunday.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-54940378004994867152013-12-21T21:34:00.001-05:002013-12-21T21:34:50.691-05:00American Jews Worry About Declining Religiosity Among Young<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Jerome Socolovsky ("Voice of America," December 18, 2013)</div>
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Washington — During the recent holiday of Hanukkah, a 9-meter tall menorah - the maximum height allowed by Jewish law - stood behind the White House.</div>
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Two Orthodox rabbis, hoisted aloft in a bucket crane, lit the candles, as a U.S. Air Force band played traditional songs, and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman relayed a “Happy Hanukkah” from the president to a small crowd that assembled despite the bitter cold and rain.</div>
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The weather did not dampen the spirits of Jews who feel that America has treated them better than most countries in their long and often troubled history. Having a giant Jewish symbol alongside the White House Christmas tree seemed like additional proof of America’s welcome.</div>
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Many Jews still have a feeling of vulnerability, though, and a major new survey by the Pew Research Center has rekindled worries about assimilation.</div>
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Provocative survey</div>
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The survey, titled “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” indicates they have declined as a share of the U.S. population - from about 3 percent in the 1950s to less than 2 percent now.</div>
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It also suggests they are becoming less observant, with 32 percent of young Jewish adults describing themselves as “having no religion” and instead identifying on the basis of ancestry, ethnicity or culture.</div>
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Survey director Alan Cooperman acknowledges that the findings have triggered alarm.</div>
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“The level of interest in this from the Jewish community is greater than I’ve seen in any previous survey that we’ve done,” he said, adding that there is particular concern that young Jews are less likely than their parents to join a synagogue or support Israel.</div>
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“Surveys do not predict the future,” Cooperman said, “but it does raise the question, are those younger Jews going to become more attached to Israel as they get older? Or is the American Jewish population going to become less attached to Israel?”</div>
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Jewish hertiage</div>
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Around 58 percent of Jews are marrying out of the faith and, Cooperman noted, “intermarriage is correlated with lower religiosity.”</div>
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Still, Cooperman said Jews are admired by almost all religious groups in America. “Even many Christian groups indicate warmer feelings toward Jews than they do toward other Christian groups in the United States,” he said.</div>
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Vice President Joe Biden - a Catholic - recently praised Jews for their contributions to American culture and society, and their key roles in movements for justice and equality.</div>
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“The truth is that Jewish heritage, Jewish culture, Jewish values are such an essential part of who we are that it’s fair to say that Jewish heritage is American heritage,” he said, noting that one out of every three American Nobel laureates has been Jewish.</div>
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Still, many Jews worry that influence may be on the wane.</div>
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Heidi Lamar grew up in the liberal Reform Jewish movement and later turned to Orthodoxy. She believes the liberal branches of her faith have no future because of intermarriage and low birth rates.</div>
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“I believe that you’re going to see Reform and Conservative Judaism just dying out,” she said after watching a presentation of the survey at a local community center.</div>
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It carried a different lesson for Conservative Rabbi Marvin Bash. “It indicates how much more we have to try to develop committed Jews,” he said.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-27363396321912614012013-12-21T21:31:00.000-05:002013-12-21T21:31:31.369-05:00Miami chiropractic office must quit making its staff practice Scientology following complaint <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Lance Dixon ("Miami Herald," December 19, 2013)</div>
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A handful of employees — now ex-employees — of a South Florida chiropractic office say they got more than a paycheck for their labors.</div>
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The workers say they were force-fed an indoctrination in the rituals of Scientology, the controversial religion that counts such celebrities as Tom Cruise and John Travolta among its members. Those rituals, the workers complained, included occasionally having to sit perfectly still in a spare room at the office, facing one another for an eight-hour staredown — as well as yelling at ashtrays and talking to the walls.</div>
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They also had to devour the books of the late L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology’s founder, including his seminal work, Dianetics, the complaint alleged.</div>
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The result of their complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: one of the more unusual employment-discrimination squabbles to come along in South Florida — resolved when the business signed a consent decree agreeing to pay $170,000 and to quit trying to dictate its employees’ religious beliefs.</div>
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Dynamic Medical Services, with offices in South Miami and Hialeah, says it never did any such thing, but says it is settling to avoid the hassle.</div>
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“We deny all of the allegations brought against Dynamic Medical in the EEOC case. However, given the expense to litigate these types of things, we made a business decision to try and resolve it,” Dynamic said in a statement.</div>
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Four former employees of Dynamic — Norma Rodriguez, Maykel Ruz, Rommy Sanchez and Yanileydis Capote — alleged that their employer forced them to participate in activities that involved Scientology, and to study the religion on a daily basis or face consequences.</div>
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Beatriz Andre, an attorney with the EEOC, said Dynamic had the First Amendment right to express religious ideas, but not to mandate them for others.</div>
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Andre said it is far more common for complaints to involve employees looking to engage in religious activity in the workplace and their employers attempting to curb that.</div>
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Sanchez and Rodriguez said their decisions to go against the mandate cost them their jobs.</div>
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Sanchez said she was fired in 2010 after enduring years of courses in Scientology from books written by Hubbard, and after participating in various exercises.</div>
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The complaint said that Sanchez was required to attend church and read Hubbard’s The Way to Happiness and Dianetics: Original Thesis over the course of several months. She also allegedly went through an Electropsychometer treatment, described on the Scientology website as a “religious artifact” that “measures the spiritual state or change of state of a person.”</div>
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Dennis Nobbe, Dynamic’s owner, told Sanchez that he wanted her to be “purified.” When Sanchez expressed concerns, she was told, “Remember you work for Dynamic and Nobbe is paying for this,” according to the complaint.</div>
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She went along with the “purification” process, which required her to sit in a sauna for five hours and take 20 “vitamin” pills on a daily basis, the complaint said. Even after a fainting spell, she was required to return to the sauna.</div>
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Sanchez said she was fired months later, after she stopped attending the church.</div>
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Rodriguez also claimed that she was discharged in 2010 after she refused to go to a church of Scientology. She explained to her supervisor that she was a Jehovah’s Witness.</div>
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The EEOC said Rodriguez was made to do exercises like walking up to someone in a shopping mall, stopping them and staring at them without speaking. She also attended courses at a church of Scientology on a weekly basis.</div>
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The two other plaintiffs, Ruz and Capote, eventually resigned from the company.</div>
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Andre said that initially dozens of other employees were interviewed, but they declined to join the complaint. She added that some of the employees, both management and rank-and-file, were practicing Scientologists and felt that the exercises were business as usual.</div>
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If a court approves the consent decree, Dynamic will be subject to further action from the court if employees allege more discrimination. The decree would also establish a policy against discrimination and require all workers to receive anti-discrimination training.</div>
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“Any time an employee asks for reasonable accommodation for religious purposes, Dynamic has to report it to the EEOC,” Andre said.</div>
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Dynamic is listed as a member of the World Institute of Scientology Enterprises. WISE, in its president’s message is described as “a fellowship of thousands of business people across the globe who recognize that the organizational and management principles developed by author L. Ron Hubbard have application to all businesses.”</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-56709577997040805952013-12-21T21:28:00.002-05:002013-12-21T21:28:50.599-05:00Faith healing couple appear in court<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Kyle Odegard ("Albany Democrat-Herald," December 21, 2013)</div>
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An Albany couple facing manslaughter charges appeared in court on Friday morning, and were scheduled for a final resolution conference on Feb. 19.</div>
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Travis and Wenona Rossiter are accused of not providing adequate medical care for their 12-year-old daughter, who died in February.</div>
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They are members of the Church of the First Born, a fundamentalist sect that believes in faith healing rather than medical treatment.</div>
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The court set a deadline of Feb. 12 for discovery, motions and independent medical testing in the case.</div>
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More than 15 people were in attendance to support the Rossiters during the hearing.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-5337476238525534172013-10-31T13:36:00.001-04:002013-10-31T13:36:21.286-04:00Ellen Davis unearths an agrarian view of the Bible<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />Yonat Shimron ("The Washington Post," October 29, 2013)</div>
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Durham, N.C. — With her gray hair tied neatly in a bun and her wire-rimmed glasses perched thoughtfully on her nose, Ellen Davis looks the part of a distinguished Bible scholar.</div>
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Her resume certainly reads like one — a Ph.D. from Yale University and teaching appointments at Union Theological Seminary, Virginia Theological Seminary, Yale and now Duke Divinity School.</div>
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Yet despite the traditional cast, Davis is leading a quiet revolution. For the past 20 years, she has been at the vanguard of theologians studying the biblical understanding of care for the land.</div>
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Her groundbreaking book, “Scripture, Culture and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible,” is considered a classic, and she travels widely to speak at churches and conferences about the role of agriculture and the ethics of land use in the Bible.</div>
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Her work makes the case that Christian theologians have for too long focused narrowly on the spiritual component of Scripture and in the process have overlooked the Bible’s material concerns.</div>
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Speaking to some 30 church members as part of a Sunday morning Creation Care series at the Chapel of the Cross Episcopal Church in nearby Chapel Hill, she focused on Genesis 1. She read aloud from the Bible and pointed out that God blesses nonhuman creatures first.</div>
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“It is not all about us,” said Davis, 63. “God is establishing a genuine relationship with creatures of sea and sky.”</div>
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This point — that the Bible does not separate human life from nonhuman life and that God cares for all creation — is consistent throughout her writings.</div>
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But neither does Davis shirk from the one passage that has embittered so many environmental activists and offered proof text to those who would deplete the Earth’s resources — God’s command to humankind in Genesis 1:28 to “subdue” the Earth and have “dominion” over its creatures.</div>
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While she does not deny that human beings have a distinct role in the Bible, she believes that special role carries special responsibility.</div>
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“The notion that the God who created heaven and earth does not care that we do damage to the heavens and the earth is completely incoherent,” said Davis, an Episcopalian. “We are answerable to God for how we use the physical order to meet our physical needs.”</div>
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Whether in church or from the Gothic limestone edifice of her divinity school office, Davis is spreading the gospel of care for God’s creation. In her personal life (she does not drive, and she buys much of her produce locally at a farmers market) and in her professional life, Davis is making sure God’s blessings in Genesis 1 do not turn into human-made curses.</div>
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It was a graduate assistant who led her down this path, more than 20 years ago.</div>
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The assistant was helping her compose a final exam for an Old Testament course she was teaching at Yale and suggested she include a question about the Bible’s view of land.</div>
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“Why?” she asked.</div>
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“Because you talk about it all the time,” he answered.</div>
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With that small seed of awareness, Davis began combing the stacks at the library to find out more about agriculture and to search the Scriptures for an ethic of land care.</div>
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The assistant’s question was timely because Davis had just returned from a trip to her native California, where a friend took her for a drive through Sonoma County. She was disturbed to find highways running though what she remembered from her childhood as farmland.</div>
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“That was grievous to me,” she said. “I came back to New Haven in shock. I was approaching 40, and I realized the changes that had taken place over the four decades of my life were drastic, uncontained and unsustainable.”</div>
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She thought she would have to dig for a few pertinent morsels scattered through the pages of the Bible. Instead, she found the Bible’s concern for an ethic of sustainability popped up everywhere she looked.</div>
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Those passages consisted of a key insight: Human communities cannot thrive apart from the health of nonhuman communities — land, water, animals and plants. Just as Adam is made from “adama,” or soil, so the one depends on the other.</div>
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“A lot of people in the creation care movement are convinced of environmental issues on the grounds of science or human rights,” said Fred Bahnson, director of the Food, Faith and Religious Leadership Initiative at Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity. “She’s coming at it from the other direction and saying care for the land is tied up with our relationship with God. It’s not a side issue.”</div>
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Indeed, for Davis, care of the land is the most reliable index of the health of God’s covenant with the people of Israel.</div>
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As she wrote: “When humanity or the people of Israel, is disobedient, thorns and briars abound; rain is withheld; the land languishes and mourns. Conversely, the most extravagant poetic images of loveliness show a land lush with growth.”</div>
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Jesus, too, spoke often of the earth — of separating the wheat from the chafe, of faith the size of mustard seeds and parables of barren fig trees and seeds falling on rocky ground.</div>
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It is a testament to her work that farmers and agrarians sing her praises. Wendell Berry, poet, farmer and environmental activist, wrote the introduction to her book.</div>
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Frederick L. Kirschenmann, fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University and president of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., is a fan, too.</div>
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Too often, he said, Christians think they have it all figured out.</div>
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“As Ellen has pointed out, there are whole sections (of the Bible) that describe how we should relate to land — that we don’t actually own it,” he said. “It’s our responsibility to care for it and pass it on to future generations.”</div>
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In recent years, Davis has devoted her energies to building up the faculty of Duke Divinity School with others who share her environmental consciousness.</div>
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“We have been led to think agriculture was not intellectually interesting; it’s not worth discussing because we’ve taken care of it,” she said. “A lot of my work has been to reverse this way of thinking.”</div>
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To that end, she was instrumental in recruiting Norman Wirzba, a professor of theology and ecology, and has helped graduate students pursue doctorates examining Scriptures in relation to the environment.</div>
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Daniel Stulac is one of those students. A farmer, he worked in Rwanda for two years doing agricultural development for the nonprofit group Partners in Health. He came to Duke because he wanted to marry agricultural concerns with biblical studies.</div>
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“A lot of scholars talk of the world of the Bible in terms of sociopolitical or economic movements or law or religious activities,” said Stulac. “What Ellen did that is so revolutionary is talk about the Bible in terms of agriculture. The world of the Bible was inhabited by farmers. She was one of the first people I encountered who showed how that world was refracted theologically through the Bible.”</div>
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Despite the enormous environmental challenges, Davis said she is encouraged by students such as Stulac and by church members who are beginning to open up to the subject.</div>
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It used to be that when Davis was invited to talk to church groups and discussed care of the land, people would say, “We thought you were going to talk about something theological.”</div>
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Nowadays, she said, church members understand the centrality of land use and its connection to the environmental crisis. At the very least, she said, “people don’t doubt the connection can be drawn.”</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-74271364593557007882013-10-31T13:33:00.001-04:002013-10-31T13:33:33.345-04:00The Talmud: Why has a Jewish law book become so popular?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />William Kremer ("BBC News," October 29, 2013)</div>
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The Talmud, the book of Jewish law, is one of the most challenging religious texts in the world. But it is being read in ever larger numbers, partly thanks to digital tools that make it easier to grasp, and growing interest from women - who see no reason why men should have it to themselves.</div>
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Step into the last carriage of the 07:53 train from Inwood to Penn Station in New York and you may be in for a surprise. The commuters here are not looking at their phones or checking the value of their shares, but peering down at ancient Hebrew and Aramaic text and discussing fine points of Judaic law.</div>
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It's a study group on wheels, and the book absorbing their attention in between station announcements is the Talmud - one of the most challenging and perplexing religious texts in the world. The group started 22 years ago, to help Long Island's Jewish commuters find their way through the "book", which stretches to well over 10 million words across 38 volumes.</div>
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When someone asked Einstein, shortly before his death, what he would do differently if he could live his life again, he replied without hesitation: "I would study the Talmud."</div>
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It contains the foundations of Halakha - the religious laws that dictate all aspects of life for observant Jews from when they wake in the morning to when they go to sleep at night. Every imaginable topic is covered, from architecture to trapping mice. To a greater extent than the other main Jewish holy book, the Torah, the Talmud is a practical book about how to live.</div>
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"The laws are very, very relevant to everyday life," says Eliezer Cohen, a real estate manager who organises the classes on the train with a couple of other amateur scholars. "Many times, I go to the office afterwards and I'll get questions on current events or in business and I'll say, 'Oh, we just learnt that today in the Talmud.' It's a blueprint for life."</div>
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But the Talmud is perhaps better described as a prompt for discussion and reflection, rather than a big book of Do's and Don'ts.</div>
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"The Talmud is really about the conversation and the conversation never ends," says Rabbi Dov Linzer, of the Yeshivat Chovevei Torah School in New York. It is a distillation not just of oral law, but also the debates and disagreements about those laws - with different rabbinic sources occupying a different space on the Talmudic page. Mixed in with it all are folk stories and jokes.</div>
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At one time, tackling this most forbidding of texts was restricted to male scholars ready to devote themselves to prolonged study in a yeshiva or religious school. Then, in 1923, a rabbi named Meir Shapiro introduced a study regime known as daf yomi, or "page-a-day". Under the supervision of a teacher or a fellow student who has prepared in advance, students read through two facing pages of Talmud and commentary, try to work out the meaning and discuss the implications for their lives.</div>
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When the commuters of Long Island struggle over a difficult passage of Talmud, they know that tens of thousands of Jews all over the world are on the same page. And when he travels abroad, Eliezer Cohen can usually find a local group to continue his studies. On one trip to Jerusalem, he even encountered a man who, like him, taught the daily reading on his way to work (although on a bus, rather than a train).</div>
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Going through the text a page a day, the book takes seven-and-a-half years to complete - a moment that is eagerly anticipated and celebrated with an event called Siyum Hashas.</div>
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Attendance levels at Siyum Hashas events illustrate the Talmud's growing popularity. In 1975, the completion of the seventh cycle was marked by an event in New York's Manhattan Center with 5,000 attendees. In 1990, some 20,000 people in the US took part in the event and in 2012, at the completion of the 12th cycle, all 90,000 seats at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey sold out for the event.</div>
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"It's clearly exploded in the last 10, 20 years, I think mostly through the number of people involved in the daf yomi project," says Dov Linzer.</div>
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And with each daf yomi cycle, the Talmud gets more accessible. Modern students can avail themselves of podcasts and round-robin emails from top scholars, and discuss difficult passages in online chat-rooms. A big moment came in 2005, with the publication of the first complete English-language edition of the work for more than 50 years, the Schottenstein edition. But there is no need to lug a giant volume around with you - the publisher, ArtScroll, is one of a number of organisations to have launched a Talmud app.</div>
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Since its launch last year, users have made around 15 million downloads, mostly of entire Talmudic volumes, Mayer Pasternak, director of Artscroll's Digital Talmud, told the BBC. To put that in perspective, the Jewish world population is thought to be a little under 14 million.</div>
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Pasternak says the Talmud is peculiarly suited to a digital treatment.</div>
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"It's a web of interconnected ideas and thoughts and commentaries," he says. "In one place something might be very poorly elaborated and you'll find in another place in the Talmud it's discussed at length - there's a constant cross-referencing process. We have about a million links in the digital app and we have a team of scholars putting the links in."</div>
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He adds that a social shift is under way. "A lot of the people that are interacting with us are women," he says. "It's obvious that they've heard about the Talmud and they're studying the Talmud."</div>
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For many Orthodox Jews, Talmudic study by women is seen as at best unnecessary and at worst, highly undesirable.</div>
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Gila Fine, editor-in-chief of religious publisher Maggid Books in Jerusalem, recalls that in her Orthodox school girls were not taught the Talmud. "As a teenager, I would often have these religious debates with my counterparts about various things in Judaism," she recalls. "And every single such argument ended with one of the boys throwing at me: 'Oh it's in the Talmud - you wouldn't know.' And that was it! I could never win an argument ever, because it stopped beyond the covers of this book, which I could not enter."</div>
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When she was 17, she secretly pulled a volume of Talmud down from her father's shelf, but was too scared to open it. "I stood there waiting for that lightning bolt to strike me down," she says. It was only later on, when Fine was at a progressive women's seminary, that she read the book properly.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-66157896042742824412013-10-31T13:31:00.002-04:002013-10-31T13:31:48.919-04:00The Rise of Pop Culture in Religious Studies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />A. David Lewis ("Publishers Weekly," October 28, 2013)</div>
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If academic conferences and scholarly panels give a glimpse of books to come, then the program for the 2013 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion signals the continuing rise of popular culture as a topic in religious studies. The AAR conference, in conjunction with the Society of Biblical Literature’s (SBL) own yearly event, will take over the Baltimore Convention Center just before Thanksgiving, November 23-26. Many of the religion scholars and practitioners of nearly every religion in attendance this year will be speaking the same language--the vernacular of popular culture.</div>
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The AAR won’t ever be confused with the Popular Culture Association—the next conference of that nationwide, scholarly association focused on American culture is not until April 2014—but television, film, music, and comic books are not far from the minds of AAR members these days. The Theopoetics group, devoted to the critical study of faith intertwining with people’s experience of art, aims to examine Scandal, ABC’s popular political thriller; the Contemporary Pagan Studies group, known for its focus on the natural world, enters dark movie theaters to look at the film version of the YA novel Beautiful Creatures (Little, Brown, 2009). Perusing the AAR program book, attendees will note a number of “pop”-centered panels and discussions dotting the long weekend, some in overlapping time slots. See “Critical Approaches to Hip-Hop and Religion” or go to “Religion and Science Fiction”? If conference-goers choose “Hip-Hop,” they can catch discussions of Battlestar Galactica or Lost on the SBL roster too.</div>
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Publishers who will be promoting and selling their books in the AAR/SBL Exhibit Hall have taken note. The staid and formal Bible commentaries and other scholarly books are still there, but now they’re just one shelf away from Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs (Baylor, Aug.) by Brett Robinson or Popcultured: Thinking Christianly about Style, Media and Entertainment by Steve Turner (InterVarsity Press, June). Presses like Bloomsbury look at religious themes graphic novels--Graven Images (2010); Do the Gods Wear Capes? (2011)—alongside titles like Pop Cult: Religion and Popular Music (2010) and The Sacred and Cinema (2012). In just the past twelve months, Routledge has been stocking its list with works such as Understanding Religion and Popular Culture (2012), Digital Religion (2012), and Bible and Cinema (Oct.).</div>
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The AAR’s attention to popular culture crosses all sorts of borders, from the international to the cyber-spatial. The Religion in South Asia section and the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture group are combining forces for a four-part panel on Bollywood and religion. Religion, Film, and Visual Culture is also teaming with the AAR’s “official” Religion and Popular Culture group for an analysis of the Coen Brothers’ works “as moral critiques of American spiritual and ethical values,” according to the panel description. The Religion, Media, and Culture group will dedicate a full session to “Reflections on Playing with Religion in Digital Gaming,” a flexible, fertile sub-field that has already spawned books such as eGods: Faith versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming by Williams Sims Bainbridge (Oxford University Press, Mar.), Of Games and God: A Christian Exploration of Video Games by Kevin Schut (Brazos Press, Jan.), and the upcoming Playing with Religion in Digital Games from Heidi A. Campbell and Gregory P. Grieve (Indiana University Press, 2014).</div>
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Few say it better, or have watched the rise of the popular in scholarly religion more closely than Megan Goodwin, Elon University visiting assistant professor of religious studies. “Popular culture plays a significant role in shaping public awareness of and opinions about minority religions,” she says. Goodwin will moderate for the first time a combined Mormon Studies Group and Religion and Popular Culture Group panel. “Scholarly consideration of popular culture is a crucial component of contemporary religious studies,” she says. “I'm gratified to see popular culture and religion evolving as an interdisciplinary conversation.”</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-71682469880368430572013-09-02T10:34:00.004-04:002013-09-02T10:34:50.296-04:00Clergy At Higher Risk Of Depression And Anxiety, Study Finds<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Katherine Bindley ("Huffington Post," August 29, 2013)</div>
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Clergy are often relied upon to guide others through difficult times, but a new study has found that the very nature of their work could put them at greater risk of developing depression and anxiety themselves.</div>
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Researchers from the Clergy Health Initiative at Duke Divinity School interviewed over 1,700 United Methodist pastors by phone and through online surveys, and found that the instances of depression were 8.7 percent and 11.1 percent, respectively, compared to the average national rate of 5.5 percent.</div>
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"It's concerning that such a high percentage of clergy may be depressed while they are trying to inspire congregations, lead communities and social change ventures, even just trying to do counseling of their own parishioners," said Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell, the Clergy Health Initiative's research director. "These are responsibilities that you would really want a mentally healthy person be engaged in, and yet it may be the challenges of those responsibilities that might be driving these high rates of depression."</div>
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Other occupations that involve a strong focus on providing care for others, such as those in nursing and social work fields, have also been tied to above-average rates of depression.</div>
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According to Proeschold-Bell, several factors are at work that make clergy more vulnerable to depression and anxiety. For one thing, pastors feel they've been called to their work by God and can perceive the stakes of their job as higher than other occupations as a result.</div>
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"If I have a bad day doing research, I can go home and relax and start again tomorrow," said Proeschold-Bell. "A clergy person goes home after a long and hard day and they are questioning themselves: 'Did I take the right course of action? Did I do what God wanted me to do?'"</div>
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In any given week, clergy are also likely to experience many more emotional highs and lows than the average person.</div>
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"They're literally holding the weddings and the funerals," said Proeschold-Bell.</div>
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On top of that, pastors can have high expectations of themselves, which can lead to pushing through work even if they're sick or feeling down. Because congregants, too, have high expectations for those who lead their churches, the pressure on clergy ends up coming from multiple sources.</div>
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Given the circumstances surrounding a life of work in ministry, Steven Scoggin, president of CareNet, a network of pastoral counseling centers based in North Carolina, said that the recent findings don't come as a surprise.</div>
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"There is a sense that they should be able to handle more because they're a person of faith," said Scoggin. "It's not really embraced well by congregations for clergy to be transparent and vulnerable with their struggles."</div>
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Scoggins's organization provided 40,000 hours of counseling last year, 15 percent of which went to helping clergy.</div>
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Oftentimes, Scoggins said, depression and anxiety are the result of clergy not being able to separate the success or failure of their church from their own identity. An important step in helping them cope, he argued, would be an increased focus on preparing for the mental struggles they are likely to face before they actually take on the role of leading a church.</div>
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"We could do more for them early in their development, in their seminary education, to have better boundaries emotionally and psychologically," Scoggin said. "I think it is very much a self-care issue."</div>
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Proeschold-Bell noted that parishioners can play a role in helping to ease the stresses on their pastors by remembering that clergy take negative feedback very personally.</div>
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"I think that parishioners should be very thoughtful about their criticisms," she said.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-9316146451919671562013-09-02T10:31:00.000-04:002013-09-02T10:31:03.349-04:00Atheism a creed that needs the same religious protections of Christianity and Islam: Ontario Human Rights Tribunal<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Tristin Hopper ("The National Post," August 28, 2013)</div>
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Atheism is a creed deserving of the the same religious protections as Christianity, Islam, and other faiths, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal has ruled in a new decision.</div>
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“Protection against discrimination because of religion, in my view, must include protection of the applicants’ belief that there is no deity,” wrote David A. Wright, associate chair of the commission, in an August 13 decision.</div>
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The ruling was spurred by a complaint from self-described secular humanist Rene Chouinard, who was opposing the District School Board of Niagara’s policy regarding the distribution of Gideon bibles.</div>
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Since 1964, as in the rest of Canada, the Gideons had offered free red Bibles to Grade 5 students in the district—provided the students had first obtained parental consent.</div>
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Three years ago, in a protest move, Mr. Choinard, a Grimsby, Ont. father of two school-age children, offered to similarly distribute the Atheist text “Just Pretend: A Freethought Book for Children.”</div>
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When, as Mr. Chouinard expected, the board rejected his offer, he took his case to the Human Rights Tribunal, alleging that the school district has “discriminated against them … because of creed.”</div>
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The District School Board of Niagara has since updated their policy to welcome the distribution of other religious texts, so long as the religion is included in the Ontario Multifaith Information Manual, a periodically updated book detailing the beliefs, holy books and dietary restrictions of groups ranging from Hare Krishnas to to Rastafarians.</div>
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So far, no other religious group aside from the Gideons has taken the school board up on the offer and, as the manual does not include atheists or other non-believers, Mr, Chouinard’s proposal remained ineligible.</div>
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For that reason, on August 13th the Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the policy was biased.</div>
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“The policy was discriminatory because its definition of acceptable materials violated substantive equality by excluding the kinds of materials central to many creeds,” reads the decision.</div>
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Not only did it block Atheist texts, wrote the Tribunal, but texts by Falun Gong and other “emerging or non-traditional creeds.” The decision also noted that some creeds, such as Native Spiritual Beliefs, do not even have texts.</div>
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Even some Christian texts, if they were not deemed sacred enough, were banned by the policy.</div>
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“The restriction to sacred or foundational texts excludes some creeds and is therefore discriminatory,” read the ruling.</div>
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Throughout, Mr. Chouinard has maintained that his intention was not to put bundles of “Just Pretend,” a book that treats God as a make-believe figure, into the hands of schoolchildren — but rather to critique the current policy.</div>
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“We believe that if non-theistic materials were distributed in an Ontario Public School … people would insist that the Public School system is not the place for people with a religious agenda; and that is exactly our point!” he wrote in a letter to the school council.</div>
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Ultimately, the Human Rights Tribunal had no objection to the Gideons distributing bibles, provided that “participation is optional” and that all creeds were included under school policy.</div>
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“If [the school board] is prepared to distribute permission forms proposing the distribution of Christian texts to committed atheists, it must also be prepared to distribute permission forms proposing the distribution of atheist texts to religious Christians,” wrote Mr. Wright.</div>
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Under a Human Rights Tribunal Order, if the school board wants to continue to allow the distribution of Gideon bibles, it has six months to draw up a new policy “permitting distribution of creed and religious publications in its schools.”</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-34234516539157821492013-09-02T10:28:00.002-04:002013-09-02T10:28:47.238-04:00Most Americans Want the Bible in Public Schools<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Nicola Menzie ("The Christian Post," August 28, 2013)</div>
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"The State of the Bible 2013" survey conducted by Barna Group on behalf of the American Bible Society has found that two-thirds of Americans think it is important for public schools to include in their curriculum values based on the Bible.</div>
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Not only do 66 percent of U.S. adults think teaching the Bible in schools is important, but a whopping 75 percent are of the opinion that teaching about the Bible in public schools could help reinforce moral principles — a viewpoint shared by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools. In general, 77 percent of those surveyed believe the morals and values of the nation are on a decline, and that a decline in Biblical literacy was one of the main causes (32 percent) in addition to the media's negative influence (29 percent) and "corruption from corporate greed" (25 percent).</div>
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There were reservations about endorsing a Bible-based curriculum, however, as nearly half (45 percent) of those who support the move were concerned that such a curriculum could end up favoring one religion over another. Another 32 percent were concerned of such a move possibly causing offense; 11 percent worried about children losing time from learning other subjects; and 9 percent found no valid reason to teach the Bible in schools.</div>
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In a public statement on "The State of the Bible 2013" survey, American Bible Society President Doug Birdsall suggested that students could benefit greatly from "the best selling book in history."</div>
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"While our intention may be to protect students from the influence of 'other people's' religion, the effect has been that we are raising a generation ignorant about the most influential book of all time," said Birdsall.</div>
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"The Bible" miniseries producer Mark Burnett wholeheartedly agrees. Burnett, who has also successfully produced "Survivor" and "The Voice," suggested in a February appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" that the Bible's stories were common knowledge outside of the United States.</div>
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"I really, really believe the Bible should be taught in public schools," said Burnett. "It is embarrassing for young Americans to go overseas in their mid-twenties after college and do business in Rio de Janeiro or Berlin or Paris and not know who David and Goliath are."</div>
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Downey and his wife, Roma Downey (who also starred in "The Bible" series), penned a joint opinion article for The Wall Street Journal further defending their view on teaching the Bible in public schools.</div>
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"The Bible has affected the world for centuries in innumerable ways, including art, literature, philosophy, government, philanthropy, education, social justice and humanitarianism," the pair wrote. "One would think that a text of such significance would be taught regularly in schools. Not so. That is because of the 'stumbling block' (the Bible again) that is posed by the powers that be in America."</div>
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"It's time to change that, for the sake of the nation's children," they added. "It's time to encourage, perhaps even mandate, the teaching of the Bible in public schools as a primary document of Western civilization."</div>
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While the Supreme Court in 1962 (Engel v. Vitale) and 1963 (School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania v. Schempp) concluded that state-sponsored prayer and mandatory Bible reading in schools violates the First Amendment, students are not prevented from using their own personal time to practice both activities. In addition, voluntary Bible literature and history courses are legally allowed in Arizona, Oklahoma, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.</div>
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Perhaps reflective of concerns some have expressed about public schools implementing the Bible into their curriculum, People for the American Way, a liberal progressive advocacy group, found that in Florida history classes, many teachers had been "teaching the Good Book wrong," and notably from a Protestant Fundamentalist Christian perspective.</div>
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"The State of the Bible 2013" survey was conducted between Jan. 16-22, 2013, via phone with 1,005 adult participants and between Jan. 17-23, 2013, via online surveys with 1,078 adults.</div>
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The Christian Post spoke exclusively in March with the American Bible Society president about the annual survey. Read "2013 State of the Bible: Americans Say Morality Is Declining, Cite Lack of Bible Reading" for more details about the survey.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-47324853223986674842013-08-28T11:41:00.001-04:002013-08-28T11:41:33.429-04:00Indian state outlaws profiting on miracles, summoning 'ghosts'<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Shivam Vij ("The Christian Science Monitor," August 26, 2013)</div>
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New Delhi - A new law against superstition and black magic in India's Maharashtra state has triggered a debate between religious groups who say that the state is interfering in personal faith, and rationalists who say religious malpractices violate human rights.</div>
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The law was hurriedly promulgated four days after Narendra Dabholkar, an activist who had been campaigning for it for a decade, was assassinated. Dr. Dabholkar headed the Committee for the Eradication of Blind Faith, which has 180 branches across Maharashtra and has exposed many Hindu preachers purporting to conduct miracles and black magic.</div>
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“We will challenge the law as it is ambiguous and interferes with personal faith,” says Abhay Vartak of the Santan Sanstha, a Hindu organization. “The law does not define much of what it outlaws – ghosts, for instance. The government itself is not clear whether ghosts exist! And if belief in ghosts is to be outlawed, then what about the Hindu Scripture the Atharva Veda, which says a lot about how to get rid of ghosts who come to inhabit a body?” he asks.</div>
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The law specifically outlaws 12 practices, making them punishable by a jail term of seven months to seven years. Of the 12 clauses, two relate to belief in ghosts. The first one forbids recommending violent and sexual practices for purging ghosts from the body – including drinking urine or stool, being tied with a rope or chain, and touching heated objects. It also outlaws creating fear by threatening to invite ghosts.</div>
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“The law has too many ’etceteras’ which will be used indiscriminately against private faith, and only against Hindus,” says Mr. Vartak of the Sanatan Sanstha.</div>
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Avinash Patil, acting president of the Committee for the Eradication of Blind Faith, says that law does not mention any religion. “We are not against private faith, only the exploitation and violence that comes when blind faith is used publicly by seers, godmen, and tantriks,” says Mr. Patil.</div>
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Opponents of the bill are unable to point out problems with the specifics of most of the clauses – such as branding women as witches and making them walk without clothes and beating them; persuading people to substitute medical aid by tying threads or getting bitten by a snake, dog, or scorpion; threatening to bring evil upon someone through supernatural powers; claiming to change the sex of the fetus by inserting fingers in the womb; claiming that one's supernatural powers can help a woman get pregnant if she had sex with him; and claiming that a disabled person has supernatural powers and thus using them for commercial purposes.</div>
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However, one clause that religious groups are particularly objecting to is about the use of miracles for commercial exploitation. Critics say that if magicians can perform miracles in ticketed magic shows and if miracles could be attributed to Mother Teresa and Sufi saints, why should others be prevented?</div>
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“I don’t think it’s outlawing claiming miracles, but exploiting the poor by using them,” says lawyer Vrinda Grover.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-53376320891767865062013-08-28T11:37:00.002-04:002013-08-28T11:37:59.342-04:00Ex-Pope Benedict's 'Mystical Experience' Story Is False, Says His Personal Secretary<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Alessandro Speciale ("The Huffington Post," August 26, 2013)</div>
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Vatican City - The personal secretary of former Pope Benedict XVI denied that the pontiff resigned as a consequence of a “mystical experience” in which God “told me” to step back from the papacy.</div>
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The Catholic news agency Zenit published a story on Aug. 19 reportedly based on the account of one of the former pope’s few visitors; Benedict is living in a refurbished monastery on the Vatican grounds.</div>
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According to the report, Benedict said he had decided to resign after what he described as a “mystical experience,” stressing that this shouldn’t be confused with a vision.</div>
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That experience sparked an “absolute desire” to dedicate his life exclusively to prayer, in a solitary relationship with God, Benedict reportedly said.</div>
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Zenit’s account received wide attention but was met with skepticism by people familiar with the former pope.</div>
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Speaking on Sunday (Aug. 25) to the Italian TV channel Canale 5, Benedict’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, said the Zenit report was “made up from alpha to omega.”</div>
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“There is nothing true in that story,” he added.</div>
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While continuing to serve as Benedict’s secretary in his retirement, Gaenswein also works with Pope Francis as Prefect of the Papal Household, charged with overseeing the staff who directly work with the new pope.</div>
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In the Canale 5 interview, Gaenswein described his role as that of a “bridge between the pope emeritus and the reigning pope.” He also assured that the two men have an “excellent” relationship.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-88408210044098309082013-08-28T11:35:00.000-04:002013-08-28T11:35:05.668-04:00Divide over religious exemptions on gay marriage<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Rachel Zoll (AP, August 25, 2013)</div>
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The battle over gay marriage is heating up in the states, energizing religious groups that oppose same-sex relationships — but also dividing them.</div>
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In June, the U.S. Supreme Court gave married gays and heterosexuals equal status under federal law, but did not declare a nationwide right for gays to marry, setting the stage for state-by-state decisions. So faith leaders are forming new coalitions and preparing for the legislative and courtroom battles ahead.</div>
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Yet, traditional religious leaders, their supporters and the First Amendment attorneys advising them are divided over strategy and goals, raising questions about how much they can influence the outcome:</div>
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— Several religious liberty experts say conservative faith groups should take a pragmatic approach given the advances in gay rights. Offer to stop fighting same-sex marriage laws in exchange for broad religious exemptions, these attorneys say. "If they need to get those religious accommodations, they're going to have to move now," said Robin Fretwell Wilson, a family law specialist at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Critics reject the idea as a premature surrender.</div>
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— Religious leaders lobbying for exemptions can't agree how broad they should be. A major difference is over whether for-profit companies should qualify for a faith-based exception.</div>
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— Some religious liberty advocates and faith leaders are telling houses of worship they could be forced to host gay weddings, with their clergy required to officiate. The Louisiana Baptist Convention is advising congregations to rewrite their bylaws to state they only allow heterosexual marriage ceremonies, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious liberty group that opposes same-sex marriage, is advising the same. But legal experts across a spectrum of views on gay rights say it can't happen given strong First Amendment protections for what happens inside the sanctuary.</div>
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"A few people at both ends of the spectrum have talked about religion and religious freedom in a way that is really destructive," said Brian Walsh, executive director of the Ethics & Public Policy's American Religious Freedom program which has formed legislative caucuses so far in 18 states. "I think they've made it polarized and difficult to understand."</div>
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The issue of accommodating religious opponents has already been a sticking point in legislative battles. In Rhode Island and Delaware, disputes over broader religious exemptions led to the failure of some same-sex union bills. Both states went on to approve civil unions in 2011, then same-sex marriage this year. In New York, gay marriage became law only after Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state's top two legislators struck an eleventh-hour compromise on religious exemptions.</div>
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Still, advocates for stronger religious protections haven't won anything close to what they've sought in the 13 states and the District of Columbia where gay marriage has been recognized.</div>
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A few states have approved specific religious exemptions related to housing or pre-marital counseling, or benefits for workers in private, faith-based groups, such as the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, according to analysis by Fretwell Wilson. Most of the states have protected religiously affiliated nonprofits from potential government penalty for refusing to host same-sex marriage ceremonies.</div>
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The only other protection written into the laws is a provision First Amendment scholars consider redundant: All spell out that clergy are exempt from performing same-sex ceremonies and can't be sued for their refusal.</div>
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The overall result: a patchwork of regulation, with gaps that are likely to become the target of lawsuits. Massachusetts and Iowa, where same-sex marriage won recognition through the courts, have approved no enhanced religious exemptions related to the rulings.</div>
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The statehouse negotiations concern what, if any, exemptions religious believers should have in the public arena. Should a religious social service agency with government funding be required to legally recognize married same-sex couples in all circumstances? Should a congregation that makes money renting property to the public be required to allow gay wedding receptions in the space?</div>
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Some advocates go further, arguing religious accommodations should extend in some cases to individuals. In this view, owners of a mom-and-pop bakery that makes wedding cakes should be exempt. So too should the county clerk who issues marriage licenses, as long as someone else in the clerk's office can step in easily and provide the service.</div>
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Many cities and states have anti-discrimination ordinances that include sexual orientation, setting up fines or other penalties for failing to comply. Absent an exemption, objectors may have to shut down their businesses or give up their jobs, religious leaders say. They argue losing your livelihood is too harsh a punishment for views on such a core religious issue as marriage.</div>
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But gay rights advocates say this argument puts too heavy a burden on gays and lesbians, and presents them with an unfair set of choices.</div>
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"In some states, the price of equality in marriage has been agreeing to give up protections against discrimination as part of the negotiations," said Jenny Pizer, senior counsel for the gay rights group Lambda Legal. "In ways, I think, other politically vulnerable groups are not required to pay that price."</div>
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Advocates for the exemptions don't agree on where they should go from here.</div>
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Nathan Diament, policy director for the Orthodox Union, which represents Orthodox Jewish congregations and has been a prominent voice on religious liberty issues, said his group hasn't taken a position on the religious rights of businesses or employers, but has advocated for broader religious exemptions for employees, such as a clerk who issues marriage licenses. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which in the last two years has made religious freedom a signature policy issue, believes any organization with faith objections, whether a for-profit corporation or a nonprofit agency, should be exempt.</div>
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Fretwell Wilson is among legal experts urging faith groups to be practical, in light of growing public support for gay relationships, and focus solely on securing exemptions, instead of trying to block a specific gay marriage law. She is part of an informal group of lawyers who have been drafting model language for exemptions to share with state lawmakers. These legal experts differ on whether same-sex marriage should be recognized, but agree on the potential risks to religious liberty.</div>
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"The religious community would have done much better to ask for protection for their religious liberty instead of trying to stop same-sex marriage and try to prevent it for everybody," said church-state expert Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia, who is recommending the more pragmatic course. "The more same-sex marriage seems inevitable, the less likely we are to see religious liberty protection in blue states."</div>
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But Matthew Franck, of the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative think tank in Princeton, N.J., argued the only real protection for religious freedom is maintaining the traditional definition of marriage. He said same-sex marriage advocates are unlikely to tolerate for long any "deviations from the 'new normal' they wish to create," so he predicted religious exemptions granted now will eventually be repealed.</div>
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"We have not lost the fight for the truth about marriage, and surrendering the field is premature," Franck said. "I continue to hope that it will never finally be necessary, and I work to make that hope a reality."</div>
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Whatever strategy the faith groups choose, there's no sign gay rights advocates are prepared to make major concessions.</div>
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Jonathan Rauch, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is one of the very few gay-rights supporters publicly urging fellow advocates to be more magnanimous. He argues that offering religious accommodations makes sense politically.</div>
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"I think there's a real risk that we will overreach and set up the other side to portray itself as the victim if we decide we have to stamp out every instance of religious based anti-gay discrimination," Rauch said. "I also think that there's a moral reason. What the gay rights movement is fighting for is not just equality for gays but freedom of conscience to live openly according to their identity. I don't think we should be in the business of being as intolerant of others as they were to us."</div>
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Others reject such accommodations.</div>
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Rose Saxe, an ACLU senior staff attorney, said the call for a middle ground, "while trying to sound reasonable, is really asking for a license to discriminate." And the Rev. Darlene Nipper of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force said religious groups have another choice: They can accept same-sex marriage.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-59479975223906032782013-08-26T12:55:00.001-04:002013-08-26T12:55:58.023-04:00The U.S.’s lagging commitment to religious freedom<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Robert P. George and Katrina Lantos Swett ("The Washington Post," August 21, 2013)</div>
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<em>Robert P. George is chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Katrina Lantos Swett is a vice chairwoman of the commission.</em></div>
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Although religious freedom is a pivotal human right, critical to national security and global stability, key provisions of the landmark International Religious Freedom Act are being neglected years after its passage. A number of studies demonstrates the link between freedom of religion and societal well-being, while its absence correlates closely with instability and violent religious extremism, including terrorism. Many governments, including those topping the U.S. foreign policy and security agendas, perpetrate or tolerate acts of religious repression, such as arbitrary detention, torture and murder.</div>
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The International Religious Freedom Act provides vital tools, including identifying and sanctioning the world’s worst violators. But over many years and different administrations, the executive branch has not employed them fully or in a timely manner. With a key deadline for action arriving this month, it is time to confront this unwise failure to act.</div>
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When the act was passed in 1998, it made the promotion of religious freedom an official U.S. foreign policy priority and established at the State Department an ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. The legislation also created a bipartisan and independent U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, on which we serve, to monitor this right worldwide and make policy recommendations to Congress, the secretary of state and the president.</div>
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Congress gave the legislation real teeth through a groundbreaking enforcement mechanism: requiring annual administration review and designation of “countries of particular concern,” defined as those governments engaging in or allowing “systematic, ongoing, egregious” violations.</div>
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While the law provides the administration with flexibility in how it will pressure those countries, the review and designation process is not discretionary. The law requires it. Whatever one’s view of appropriate sanctions for violators, there can be little disagreement on the imperative of bearing witness to abuses.</div>
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Unfortunately, neither Republican nor Democratic administrations have consistently designated countries that clearly meet the standard for offenders. The Bush administration issued several designations in its first term but let the process fall off track in its second. The Obama administration issued designations only once during its first term, in August 2011.</div>
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The result? Violators such as Egypt, Pakistan and Vietnam are escaping the accountability that the International Religious Freedom Act is meant to provide.</div>
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Even those nations currently designated as “countries of particular concern” could escape accountability if there are no designations this month; under the law, countries remain designated until removed, but any corresponding penalties expire after two years. Without new designations, sanctions attached in 2011 to Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea and Sudan will expire this month. And while those countries are subject to sanctions under other U.S. laws, allowing the International Religious Freedom Act’s sanctions authority to expire would send the disturbing message that the United States won’t implement its own law on religious freedom.</div>
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To be sure, the Obama administration has taken some positive steps. It created a State Department working group on religion and foreign policy and this month established a new faith-based office, both tasked with religious engagement.</div>
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Also this month, Secretary of State John Kerry announced a U.S. Strategy on Religious Leader and Faith Community Engagement. As our commission has recommended, promoting religious freedom is among the three key objectives of this engagement.</div>
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Engagement should be part of any strategy for the promotion of religious freedom. But what will move gross offenders to stop persecuting individuals if not the credible threat of consequences? By letting the process of designating offenders atrophy, the United States surrenders its leverage while creating a chilling precedent for other rights. If this process is allowed to wither, what will happen to similarly designed programs such as the tiered system of the Trafficking in Persons Report, which was modeled on this approach?</div>
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The process of designating countries of particular concern works when deployed as intended — that is, not as a single bludgeon but as a targeted tool. When diplomacy is combined with the prospect or reality of such designations and attendant sanctions or other specific diplomatic and related actions, repressive governments — including Vietnam and Turkmenistan — have made meaningful changes. Moreover, countries often consider such a designation a stigma and blow to their world standing. Because a designation of concern is rightly perceived as an important factor in a country’s relationships with the United States, it can create political will for reform where none otherwise would exist.</div>
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For the sake of freedom and security, it is time to apply the International Religious Freedom Act fully and the country designation process decisively. Congress has the right and the duty to press the executive branch to do so.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-7775524498879772762013-08-26T12:53:00.000-04:002013-08-26T12:53:18.997-04:00Beit Jimal monastery in Israel hit by suspected ultranationalist Jewish vandals<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Ori Lewis (Reuters, August 21, 2013)</div>
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Vandals hurled a firebomb at the outer wall of a Roman Catholic monastery in Israel and daubed anti-Christian graffiti on it, a police spokeswoman said on Wednesday.</div>
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No damage was caused to the Beit Jimal monastery, near the town of Beit Shemesh, and no one was hurt, the spokeswoman, Luba Samri said.</div>
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She said the words “revenge” and “gentiles will perish” were painted in Hebrew on the wall, probably late on Tuesday.</div>
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“All lines of investigation are being looked at, including nationalistic motives,” Samri said.</div>
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Jewish ultranationalists are widely believed to have been behind the vandalism of several churches and mosques in Israel and the occupied West Bank in recent years.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-84283215872416692552013-08-26T12:48:00.001-04:002013-08-26T12:48:21.477-04:00Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim Says Traditional Shtreimel Fur Hats Desecrate God's Name Due To Animal Cruelty<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1lLJl33G329ykjQn9Krt__DLnMgAVYHa3PqfFjnkjMGUKC9MkO-kkX4nT26QoDrRpDg6DBhyphenhyphen9Wy8Q-_-c6E1Z5Q2UkIAADX_nftLMO7IAg1pV65LV2GqS4e_PkEh8J-3vC_SBsj5riimI/s1600/f130313ns42-e1377203580247-635x357.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1lLJl33G329ykjQn9Krt__DLnMgAVYHa3PqfFjnkjMGUKC9MkO-kkX4nT26QoDrRpDg6DBhyphenhyphen9Wy8Q-_-c6E1Z5Q2UkIAADX_nftLMO7IAg1pV65LV2GqS4e_PkEh8J-3vC_SBsj5riimI/s320/f130313ns42-e1377203580247-635x357.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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("The Huffington Post," August 23, 2013)</div>
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Haredi Rabbi Schlomo Pappenheim made a surprising statement on Tuesday, when he called on Chassidim to abandon their traditional shtreimel hats, which are normally made out of real animal fur, in favor of synthetic versions. He couched his advice in traditional Jewish law, saying that the production of shtreimels disregards the law which prohibits causing animals needless pain (tza'ar ba'alei chayim).</div>
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Pappenheim went so far as to say that wearing a shtreimel today constitutes Chilul Hashem, or the desecration of God's name, due to the wide public awareness of the need to prevent cruelty to animals. “We live in an era in which people are more stringent, and they make a lot of noise about tza’ar ba’alei chayim. So we must stop this custom of hurting animals,” he said, according to Ma’ariv.</div>
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The shtreimel is a fur hat worn on Shabbat and other special occasions by Haredi men, such as after marriage. It is made of the tips of sable, mink, marten, or fox tails, and each hat is made up of about 30 animals. It can cost between $1,00 and $5,000.</div>
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Pappenheim is the chairman of Ha’edah Hacharedit, an anti-Zionist faction of Israel's Haredi public estimated to have between 50 and 100 thousand followers. He made his remarks at an animal rights conference which featured other prominent religious leaders.</div>
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"We should get to a point where people would be ashamed to wear anything but a synthetic shtreimel," he said.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-54880008748029602222013-08-25T12:36:00.001-04:002013-08-25T12:36:22.990-04:00Quebec Muslims slam proposed ban on religious headwear<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8qOAPry8Po3dwFK_j-A13ZH7ipdaZevMWEQcybUl9FHFcsWs4NhX2TY20UW34i5udLca-PbOfrxbIHG4El18gpk_EYRnns3ZoIEDQaG0adSMId7oYMzoOFMIK1DRWfKlsxlZX4l5GYB78/s1600/src.adapt.480.low.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8qOAPry8Po3dwFK_j-A13ZH7ipdaZevMWEQcybUl9FHFcsWs4NhX2TY20UW34i5udLca-PbOfrxbIHG4El18gpk_EYRnns3ZoIEDQaG0adSMId7oYMzoOFMIK1DRWfKlsxlZX4l5GYB78/s320/src.adapt.480.low.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Massoud Hayoun ("Al Jazeera," August 21, 2013)</div>
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Canadian Muslim Kathy Nalas says she won't give up her headscarf or her job as a children's speech pathologist in Quebec, amid reports that the provincial government aims to ban religious dress and symbols from places that receive public funding -- a move that would essentially import controversial European legislation on religious dress to North America.</div>
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Quebecois hospital and school workers would reportedly need to "display their religious neutrality," according to a report that was published Tuesday in Le Journal de Quebec and sparked a lively debate on pluralism across Canada.</div>
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According to the article, which cited unnamed sources, ministers from the Parti Quebecois (PQ) government would need to amend the province’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms in order to institute the ban, which would also allow private-sector employers to choose whether employees can wear religious dress.</div>
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A PQ spokesman told Al Jazeera that the report was baseless, and that the leftist, French-Canadian nationalist party's specific plans to promote secularism would be revealed when legislation goes before the provincial parliament in September.</div>
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He noted that secularism has always been a part of the party's platform, including in the September 2012 election, which won it a minority mandate in parliament -- with its leader, Pauline Marois, at the head of government, while the party occupies only 54 of 125 seats in Quebec's National Assembly.</div>
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Nalas, a Montreal native who considers herself a "Muslim feminist," says the reported measure "goes against the feminist movement in Quebec."</div>
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"If you ban (the headscarf), you don’t give the woman a chance to work. It will be impossible for women to study or work," she said.</div>
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Amira Elghawaby of the Ottawa-based advocacy organization the National Council of Canadian Muslims echoed Nalas.</div>
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"Quebec is supposed to be a progressive province, and PQ is a progressive party, so it’s unusual that a government that’s committed to equality to start dictating to women what they can and cannot wear."</div>
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Nalas and Elghawaby believe measures toward secularism are based on France's own legislated commitment to keeping religion out of the public sphere.</div>
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Former French President Jacques Chirac signed a law in 2004 banning "religious symbols" at French public schools. In 2010, France banned the niqab, a face covering worn by some Muslim women.</div>
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In addition to potentially barring many Muslim women from work in the public sector, the Quebec ban would also affect observant Jewish and Sikh men’s ability to wear the headdresses mandated by their religions.</div>
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Elghawaby said the law contradicts Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees "freedom of religion."</div>
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"This will be challenged and struck down in the Supreme Court," she said.</div>
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But it seems that, for now, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is leaving the discussion to the provinces.</div>
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"This is a debate for provincial leaders to have in Quebec," a spokesman for Harper’s office told Al Jazeera.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-20408897069265872162013-08-25T12:32:00.000-04:002013-08-25T12:32:02.841-04:00Three 'Moonies' set themselves ablaze in S. Korea<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaEK9ZkT75AAeHrjM_OUM_2b8x2Ipj8ed1OgJ1TNHP1texWJYoVbMX45IQ-BPK3bEu_t0Hpw9YPzGS5NzYFUzN33r6rQpgfx9SncTLAwv3v-0EdGtIQue8iZkvdybGQJs8cC_7DYXa2w93/s1600/1-6-8aa90.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaEK9ZkT75AAeHrjM_OUM_2b8x2Ipj8ed1OgJ1TNHP1texWJYoVbMX45IQ-BPK3bEu_t0Hpw9YPzGS5NzYFUzN33r6rQpgfx9SncTLAwv3v-0EdGtIQue8iZkvdybGQJs8cC_7DYXa2w93/s320/1-6-8aa90.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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(AFP, August 22, 2013)</div>
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Three Japanese Unification Church members set themselves on fire in South Korea Thursday before the first anniversary of the death of the controversial church founder Sun Myung Moon, a report said.</div>
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The two women and one man had doused themselves with paint thinner and set themselves alight in a village at the church's global headquarters in Gapyeong east of Seoul, Yonhap news agency said.</div>
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They suffered severe burns and two of them were in serious condition, it added. Church officials were not available for comment.</div>
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Moon died at the age of 92 on September 3 last year, but followers observe August 23 as the first anniversary of his passing according to the lunar calendar.</div>
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Moon, revered by his followers but described by critics as a charlatan who brainwashed church members, was a deeply divisive figure whose shadowy business dealings once saw him jailed in the United States.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkbwGJrzzZEFOVynx5Qzr0hm2xSevM-yLt0sIiLUlPAcfxpUp0eKcVEP6HTuOLhyOe5oeIuNSbsGHEx_WYNKa42-hcAjjEtlYE6PpQyuPvlYBJ4d_xEHD_uUWC0Gq0NiC0Ps9GqVSq1gV3/s1600/masswedding1723_3e.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkbwGJrzzZEFOVynx5Qzr0hm2xSevM-yLt0sIiLUlPAcfxpUp0eKcVEP6HTuOLhyOe5oeIuNSbsGHEx_WYNKa42-hcAjjEtlYE6PpQyuPvlYBJ4d_xEHD_uUWC0Gq0NiC0Ps9GqVSq1gV3/s320/masswedding1723_3e.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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The teachings of the Unification Church are based on the Bible but with new interpretations. Moon saw his role as completing the unfulfilled mission of Jesus to restore humanity to a state of "sinless" purity.</div>
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While the church claims a worldwide following of three million, experts suggest the core membership is far smaller.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-79623779556135877192013-08-25T12:24:00.002-04:002013-08-25T12:24:41.846-04:00Atheists Can Sue IRS Over Failure To Enforce Limits On Churches' Political Speech<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKkva2ION0bmx_WjeWm9wnLSA2CKY2TNFOteUF496t03bIFNVI4HWASNXGpznYBVmR2K40bO75Hfab-rkw7Slmr_cMo2SXW6M45wEB7gtLJ9r6BWtYTuMrG60geBfxIJY5MwoMqiQuBHkO/s1600/church-state-black-300x225.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKkva2ION0bmx_WjeWm9wnLSA2CKY2TNFOteUF496t03bIFNVI4HWASNXGpznYBVmR2K40bO75Hfab-rkw7Slmr_cMo2SXW6M45wEB7gtLJ9r6BWtYTuMrG60geBfxIJY5MwoMqiQuBHkO/s1600/church-state-black-300x225.jpg" /></a></div>
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Nick Wing ("The Huffington Post," August 22, 2013)</div>
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The Freedom From Religion Foundation took home an important victory on Monday, when a federal judge in Wisconsin ruled that the group could proceed with its lawsuit over the Internal Revenue Service's alleged failure to enforce a ban on partisan politicking by tax-exempt religious groups.</div>
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The IRS had earlier filed a motion to dismiss the case, which the national foundation for atheists and agnostics had filed after the November elections last year. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman denied the motion on Monday, writing that the FFRF "has standing to seek an order requiring the IRS to treat religious organizations no more favorably than it treats the Foundation."</div>
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Tax-exempt religious organizations, as well as other educational and charitable groups registered under 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code, are prohibited from partisan electioneering. The FFRF suit contends that the IRS is failing to enforce that restriction particularly when it comes to churches, which the group argues constitutes a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. The suit also claims that the alleged IRS inaction undermines equal protection rights by giving preferential treatment to tax-exempt religious organizations over other 501(c)(3) groups, including the FFRF.</div>
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Annie Laurie Gaylor, the FFRF's co-president, applauded Adelman's decision in a statement.</div>
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“The time for a free ride for churches is over,” Gaylor said. “The rest of us pay so much more in taxes because clergy pay so much less. If these churches -- which are accountable to no one in government yet get so many favors -- are allowed to engage in tax-exempt politicking, it would be the ruination of our democracy.”</div>
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Adelman's ruling came just days after a commission set up by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) submitted its recommendation to the IRS, urging it to scrap the rules against partisan political speech by religious institutions. The panel of church and nonprofit leaders and legal experts also said that the IRS wasn't currently enforcing those rules.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUK6NmU5xN2Rn_25kqhKGqR3Dg2-HvK9cNnMAgu4OmAyhOL3L4u6nTfxfzR-cEmDG5QSfcCJO6piohTl7AlSJSpxF9Ult0FG9N6XFoY5zbh710oPWsN_oXg5n74KLssO8Lq0LbSU4cogFA/s1600/1146701_500627736696358_251986465_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="207" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUK6NmU5xN2Rn_25kqhKGqR3Dg2-HvK9cNnMAgu4OmAyhOL3L4u6nTfxfzR-cEmDG5QSfcCJO6piohTl7AlSJSpxF9Ult0FG9N6XFoY5zbh710oPWsN_oXg5n74KLssO8Lq0LbSU4cogFA/s320/1146701_500627736696358_251986465_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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The FFRF has argued that allowing churches and other 501(c)(3) groups to legally endorse candidates and engage in partisan politicking would be catastrophic. In her statement, Gaylor went as far as to say that such a move would make the Supreme Court's controversial Citizens United campaign finance decision "look like child’s play."</div>
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In recent years, religious institutions have taken clear steps to challenge the IRS over political speech. Many tested the agency's willingness to enforce the restrictions last October with a nationwide event dedicated to breaking tax rules and endorsing mainly Republican candidates. The IRS took no action.</div>
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The First Amendment generally allows religious leaders to speak on any issue. But candidate endorsements are disallowed as a condition of religious institutions' tax-exempt status, which has saved them $145 billion over 10 years.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-30364928037661544762013-08-24T19:03:00.001-04:002013-08-24T19:03:35.376-04:00The Man Behind The Historic Implosion Of The Ex-Gay Movement<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQs4cgl7G9WCJkt3VsrsWfWI5eodt9tE741OCAWcqtsrsXuTZcnhcgESKTkq_320xv5e89jKPVYdG34yHMuty-3jrJ57-RZxU_KF4rFrw6iEcKfuCEMvczUGO5amQ_GsnKGENz3iJFtTXV/s1600/exgayprotest.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQs4cgl7G9WCJkt3VsrsWfWI5eodt9tE741OCAWcqtsrsXuTZcnhcgESKTkq_320xv5e89jKPVYdG34yHMuty-3jrJ57-RZxU_KF4rFrw6iEcKfuCEMvczUGO5amQ_GsnKGENz3iJFtTXV/s320/exgayprotest.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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David Peisner ("BuzzFeed," August 22, 2013)</div>
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It’s mid-afternoon on a Monday in July and the offices that once housed Exodus International are quiet. Exodus, which for 37 years was more or less synonymous with the ex-gay movement and at its peak employed 24 people in this office, closed down in June. Since then, a skeleton crew of three people has rattled around the largely empty workspace overseeing the dismantling of an association that once included more than 150 Christian ministries in 17 countries, all devoted to the idea that homosexual feelings need not lead to eternal damnation. They could be managed, ignored, overcome, repented for, and perhaps even transformed into something more biblically acceptable. Just as long as they weren’t acted upon. Its mission statement: “Mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality.”</div>
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The building — a fading white, multistory rectangular block situated on a side street in an area of Orlando well-stocked with dreary strip malls and office parks — is wholly unremarkable, the kind of place you’d drive by a thousand times without taking a second glance. Exodus bought it five years ago, but it hasn’t been a great investment, and in light of the organization’s demise, the property is now up for sale.</div>
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Despite recent upheaval, Alan Chambers looks pretty comfortable ensconced in his large corner office on the second floor. Chambers, 41 — who after living as a gay man in his younger years now has a wife and two children — led Exodus for its final 12 years. He’s long been a poster boy for the Christian right’s belief that it was possible to “pray the gay away.” Chambers disputes the notion that he ever promoted Exodus as the “gay cure” ministry, though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, not the least of which is the book he wrote in 2009 called Leaving Homosexuality: A Practical Guide for Men and Women Looking for a Way Out. He maintains that his overarching goal was always to provide homosexuals with the comfort, fellowship, and love they’d been denied by traditional churches. And yet, for example, in a 2005 Exodus newsletter, he wrote, “One of the many evils this world has to offer is the sin of homosexuality. Satan, the enemy, is using people to further his agenda to destroy the Kingdom of God and as many souls as he can.”</div>
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The following year, he and his deputy at Exodus, Randy Thomas, visited the White House at George W. Bush’s invitation as Bush announced his push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Chambers was also a prominent supporter of Proposition 8 in California. In 2009, an Exodus board member — not Chambers — traveled to Uganda and spoke at a conference on the evils of homosexuality that helped build the hysteria there that led to the country’s infamous 2009 “Kill the Gays” bill, which prescribed a potential death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” or life imprisonment for “the offence of homosexuality.” (It has never been voted on but was reintroduced last year.) It took Chambers nearly a year to publicly disavow his organization’s involvement.</div>
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And yet this June, Chambers not only closed Exodus in sudden and dramatic fashion, but acknowledged the ineffectiveness of gay-to-straight reparative therapy and offered a remarkable mea culpa that apologized for his organization’s many missteps. He’s now founding a new organization focused on bringing Christians and homosexuals together, called Speak. Love. Many in the LGBT community hailed Exodus’ demise as a victory in the culture wars but were disappointed Chambers hadn’t gone further in his support of gay rights or his renouncement of the religious underpinnings of the ex-gay theology. To many evangelicals, the man who had not only been a leader of the ex-gay movement but also a living example of its successes was now a lost sheep, or worse, a heretic.</div>
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“There are times when I feel like I don’t have a country,” Chambers says, not far from a wall of photos that include shots of him with his wife, with his kids, and with Mike Huckabee. “There are people who have been invested in this fight for years on both sides. It’s the vocal minority on either side that gets the microphone. What I believe is there are far more people in the middle.”</div>
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It’s this middle group that he’s hoping to represent and talk to. The question is, will he have the chance? At the moment, he’s working on defining specific plans for the new organization and raising money to keep the lights on. But in order to succeed, he’ll need to convince people that his divisive past has indeed passed, and that his own personal struggle won’t get in the way of his public mission.</div>
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Alan Chambers is not gay, although this kind of depends on what your definition of “is” is. To hear him recount his personal history, it sounds very much like the familiar story of a young man coming to terms with his sexuality.</div>
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I meet Chambers for lunch in the posh Orlando suburb of Winter Park, where he grew up. I get there before him, look around, and wonder if his choice of locale — a sleek sports bar with 30 flat-screen TVs assaulting diners with reruns of SportsCenter — is a way of nakedly proclaiming his embrace of traditional gender roles, but the truth is, the place he really wanted to meet, an upscale Italian bistro down the street, is closed on Mondays. He arrives apologizing for being a few minutes late, dressed in a blue blazer, striped button-down shirt, blue bow tie, and jeans cuffed fashionably at his ankles, along with tan loafers, no socks. He sits down and immediately makes a joke about ordering an appetizer called “bleu balls.” He’s definitely not trying to butch it up.</div>
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Chambers is bald with a neatly trimmed gray beard framing his face. He comes from a big family, the youngest of six kids. As in most families in central Florida, sports were a big deal, and Chambers’ lack of ability or interest in anything athletic immediately made him stand out. His parents persisted for a while in trying to get him to play baseball, but he couldn’t hit, he couldn’t throw, it was hot outside, and he was bored.</div>
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“I hated it,” he says. “Maybe if the uniform was cool enough I could’ve liked it. But most of my friends were girls, so I gravitated toward the things they gravitated toward.” He dressed up in his sisters’ clothes and often pretended to be a girl. “People thought I was a girl. I had beautiful curly brown hair, these big eyes, and eyelashes for days. People would say, ‘Your little sister is so cute!’ All this just reinforced my feeling that I was not like other boys.” Still, it took time for him to understand what all these things really meant. “It was puberty when I realized all the boys in my class liked girls and I liked all the boys.”</div>
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This revelation horrified Chambers. He’d been raised Southern Baptist in a heavily religious family with a father who was ex-military. He had no experience or knowledge of what it meant to be gay, other than believing it was bad. He didn’t know anyone who was openly gay, and growing up in the ’80s, there were few, if any, gay role models. As he got older, he was teased and bullied. He remembers being afraid to change in front of other boys before gym class, and having them bang on the stall where he would get dressed, hollering “fag” and “queer” at him through the walls.</div>
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“That’s probably when I realized, I’ve got to do something about this,” he says. “Then the prayers started every night: ‘God, fix me. Cure me. Heal me. Whatever I’ve done to become this dirty, rotten sinner, fix this.’”</div>
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As his high school years waned and he started attending a local community college, Chambers was in the midst of a full-on struggle with his sexuality.</div>
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“The majority of the encounters I had were shameful, anonymous encounters,” he says. “I don’t know that tons of people feel good about that stuff anyway.” Even when he coupled with men he had gotten to know a little bit, he was filled with self-loathing. “Because it wasn’t about a relationship, it was about sex. That was difficult, especially for a typical Christian kid who was afraid he was going to go to hell at every turn.” After confiding in a counselor at a Christian youth retreat about his homosexual urges when he was 19, he was turned on to a local ministry in Winter Park called Eleutheros that was affiliated with Exodus.</div>
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At the time, Exodus had been around for over 20 years; it was started by a group of men in the 1970s who were struggling with the same tension between their sexual attractions and their devout belief that homosexuality was a biblical sin.</div>
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Most of their programs closely mirrored Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step program, with open groups where people could talk about their struggles, and “accountability partners” who worked much like AA sponsors to be on call to help a member deal with daily temptations. In addition, many of the ministries offered mental health counseling — some done by licensed professionals, but plenty also by lay or faith-based counselors — for those working out deep-seated issues such as childhood sexual abuse. Many of the ministries also had connections to reparative therapists who engage in the controversial practice of trying to change the sexual orientation of their clients through a mix of psychoanalysis of past traumas, behavior modification, engagement in traditional “gender-appropriate” activities and other processes such as “holding therapy,” in which a man would hug another man at length with the goal of symbolically repairing the non-sexual male bond that may have never successfully formed between the man and his father. (The scientific theories behind reparative therapy have been debunked and the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, and American Psychological Association have all been critical of the practice. In 2001, United States Surgeon General David Satcher issued a report stating, “There is no valid evidence that sexual orientation can be changed.” New Jersey this week became the second state, after California, to outlaw the practice for minors. Similar bills have be introduced to state legislatures in New York and Massachusetts.)</div>
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Chambers has often said that his introduction to Exodus saved his life. Coming from a sheltered childhood, it was the first time he’d been around other people wrestling with the same issues he was. Somewhat ironically, though, his early days at Exodus also coincided with his deepening identification as a gay man. “I went to Exodus when I was 19, and that’s when my eyes were opened to the whole gay world around me,” he says. “So in the midst of being involved with the local Exodus group, I also got involved with the gay community. I wouldn’t say I was out and proud with everybody I knew, but there were certain people that knew, people I worked with at a restaurant.”</div>
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His goal at Exodus though was clear: He wanted to become straight. “I went in and told the guy the first time I met with him, ‘I want to be here six months, then I want to be done with this.’”</div>
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Chambers told his parents of his struggles with what he calls “same-sex attractions,” and they surprised him by being extremely supportive, particularly of his efforts to change. Chambers attended an open group, sharing his experiences and praying for himself and his fellow strugglers. He worked with an accountability partner and had sessions with a counselor to talk about being molested by an older teenage boy when he was 10.</div>
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“He was an actual licensed mental health counselor that I would meet with once a week and we’d talk through all these things,” he says. “No hocus-pocus, just talking. It was amazing and helped me deal with a lot of wounds I had. But I never went through reparative therapy.”</div>
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Despite the work he was doing, he eventually realized his original goal — to walk out in six months as a happy, well-adjusted heterosexual — was unrealistic. “I hoped the gay stuff would go away and I wouldn’t feel that way anymore,” he says. “It never did happen.”</div>
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The next morning I meet Chambers and his wife, Leslie, at a Starbucks. She’s got brown hair and a warm face dotted with a few freckles, and she’s wearing a pink-and-white blouse with a blue jean skirt. She’s not the timid and retiring minister’s wife of popular cliché, but rather sharp, funny, and down-to-earth. She tells me the first time she ever saw Alan was on TV, in the mid-’90s.</div>
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“He and a friend of his were sharing their stories,” she says. “So I knew that part of him first. The next time I saw him, he walked into church with that same guy and I was like, ‘There’s those two gay guys.’”</div>
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Chambers says he was attracted to Leslie the first time he saw her. He’d been mildly attracted to women before, and had a few girlfriends back in high school, but he’d never felt anything like this in the past. At the time, Leslie was working as a nanny for the family of then-Major League pitcher Orel Hershiser, and she got Chambers a job as Hershiser’s personal assistant. A few months later, Alan told her he wanted to be more than just friends.</div>
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“I told him it’s never going to happen,” she says. Over the course of the next few months, though, her feelings began to change. In March 1997, they went on their first date, and the following January they were married.</div>
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“I was 30 years old and hadn’t found anybody yet,” says Leslie. “But I had only two things I wanted in a guy: I wanted somebody who liked me first. I wanted to be pursued. And I wanted somebody who could tell me no, because I was a fairly strong person.”</div>
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Chambers laughs. “Was.”</div>
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Leslie continues. “Those were the only two things. Well, and he was a Christian, which was important and non-negotiable, so that wasn’t even on my list. Over those months that we were friends, he absolutely became that person. He pursued me first, and I didn’t doubt him in his pursuit of me. I felt very validated and secure in his attractions for me.”</div>
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After getting married, Chambers grew more invested in Exodus. He’d first begun working part-time at Eleutheros when he dropped out of college in 1992. He’d gone full-time at Eleutheros in 1994 but then quit two years later to work with the Hershisers. In early 1999, he started his own local Exodus ministry, focusing on youths and teenagers grappling with homosexuality. The next year, he was named to Exodus’ board of directors, and the year after that, he was elected president. From the beginning, his goal was to grow Exodus into an aggressive, dynamic, influential organization. And as a charismatic speaker with a personal testimony of his own transformation from unhappy gay man to happily married heterosexual, he was a walking advertisement for the group’s then-motto: “Change Is Possible.”</div>
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Of course, the truth was a bit more complicated. Chambers has admitted many times that his attraction to men has never fully receded but maintains that the person in the world he is most attracted to is his wife. The couple have two children, a boy and a girl, both 8 years old, both adopted. Before I can even ask why they chose to adopt, Chambers tells me.</div>
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“We were infertile,” he says. “Both of us. We tried for seven years to have kids and to no avail. We got the two best things we could’ve ever asked or prayed for.” When I bring up the subject of their sex life, Chambers answers like someone used to fielding the question.</div>
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“Sex is a huge part of our marriage,” he says. “It has been and it’s great and I love it. I’m attracted to my wife and I don’t think of anything but my wife when I’m having sex with her. I have never in almost 16 years of marriage ever felt a temptation to be unfaithful to her. But sex isn’t the pinnacle of our life together, nor should it be. There are a bunch of things more important than my sexual impulses, whether they’re toward men or toward women, and I have both.”</div>
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Exodus was always more of an umbrella that loosely connected separate ministries; it got funding from members and also raised money from churches and donors. Chambers and his team would issue policies and guidelines from their office in Orlando, but they never felt like they were completely in control of the group’s many tentacles.</div>
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“I hoped that eventually the entire organization would be on the same page,” he says. “You walk into a Starbucks and you get the same latte in New York City as you do in Kentucky. I longed for that with Exodus. There was always tension.” Over the last few years, his personal views on homosexuality began to become more moderate. As early as 2008, in various speeches and interviews, Chambers flirted with the notion that homosexuality might not be a mortal sin that would endanger a Christian’s salvation, which caused considerable grumbling among Exodus’ rank-and-file membership. He subsequently found that he was doing a lot of apologizing or explaining on behalf of Exodus’ member ministries, which he didn’t always agree with.</div>
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In January of last year at Exodus’ annual leadership retreat, Chambers felt that the organization had reached a crossroads, so he laid out four possible paths for the future: 1) stay the same; 2) simply re-brand; 3) modify and change everything but continue on; 4) shut down. The original plan coming out of that meeting was a combination of options 2 and 3. Around this same time, he publicly admitted that the reparative therapy that Exodus had been promoting for years didn’t work for “99.9%” of people. He also began saying unequivocally that gay Christians need not repent for their homosexuality in order to get into heaven. These two bombshells caused Exodus International to splinter, with many of the member ministries peeling off to form the Restored Hope Network.</div>
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In April, he taped an appearance on Our America with Lisa Ling on the Oprah Winfrey Network, in which he sat in a church basement in a circle of folding chairs with some Exodus “survivors” — most of whom had since accepted their own homosexuality and felt emotionally damaged by their experiences with the ministry. He opened by reading an apology. In it, he said:</div>
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“I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly ‘on my side’ who called you names like sodomite — or worse. I am sorry that I, knowing some of you so well, failed to share publicly that the gay and lesbian people I know were every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people I know. … More than anything, I am sorry that so many have interpreted this religious rejection by Christians as God’s rejection. I am profoundly sorry that many have walked away from their faith and that some have chosen to end their lives.”</div>
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He went on to say that he could not apologize for his “deeply held beliefs about the boundaries [he] sees in scripture surrounding sex,” but wouldn’t try to impose those views on anyone else anymore. Then, he sat mostly silent, like a “deer in headlights,” according to one attendee, as the Exodus “survivors” battered him with their tales of personal woe for three and a half hours. Many of them did not accept his apology.</div>
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“No matter what you do, no matter what you change, you’re still selling that lie, and you know it,” one former congregant said. “That’s the worst thing. You know deep down inside Alan, that it is still a bald-faced lie.”</div>
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On June 19, the day before the segment aired, he posted a longer version of the apology on Exodus’ website — it’s worth reading in full if for no other reason than that it’s rare to see public contrition that seems like a sincere expression of regret rather than pro forma damage control performed by someone recently caught with his pants down — and announced Exodus’ shuttering.</div>
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I ask him about the line in the apology acknowledging that some former Exodus clients have been driven to suicide. Does he feel personally responsible for that?</div>
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He falls silent for a moment before answering.</div>
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“There are people who say I’ve ruined their life,” he says. “There are certainly things I’ve said that caused people shame. Do I think I’ve caused people to kill themselves?” He takes a deep breath and pauses for another moment. “I don’t think so. But we deal with very, very vulnerable people. Those are things that haunt me. But I can’t live my life there because I’d never get anything else done. All I can do is say I’m sorry and do something different.”</div>
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Chambers is good company — even those who disagree with him usually acknowledge this — and you get the feeling that much of his success within Exodus grew from this fact. He has no formal religious training or education, something he takes pride in and says has always irked a certain segment of the Exodus’ membership.</div>
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“That just drives them craaazy,” he says. We’re driving to his office in his minivan, a gray Honda Odyssey. On the radio, NPR is reporting on comments Pope Francis made aboard his airplane recently, on a flight from Brazil to Rome.</div>
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“If someone is gay and searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis said, indicating a sharp break in tone, if not in policy, for the Catholic Church. Chambers is not a Catholic, but is buoyed a little by the comments. I mention that Francis seems a lot looser than his predecessor, Benedict.</div>
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“My wife and I were in Rome in 2007 and did a private tour of the Vatican,” he says. “Our tour guide said that Pope Benedict was gay and it was well-known within private circles. One of her best friends was part of the Swiss Guard. She said it was very well-known that his personal assistant was his lover and they shared a bed and quarters.” When Benedict stepped down as pope, he says, he wondered if all that had anything to do with it. Of course plenty have similar theories about Chambers himself.</div>
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“Really, what you see is Alan Chambers projecting his own issues onto everyone else,” says Christopher Doyle, an ex-gay psychotherapist who is president of Voice of the Voiceless, an organization that argues for ex-gay rights. “You have to realize, Alan never went through therapy. He came to a point where he said, ‘My same-sex attractions didn’t go away. Therefore it didn’t work for anybody.’ That’s not true.” He sees Exodus’ closure as a huge setback for his cause and calls Exodus “an organization that has given hope to thousands of people for 35 years.”</div>
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Doyle says Chambers and the rest of the Exodus leadership focused on the ministry side of it — which, he grants, is also an important component — but that they never embraced or even understood reparative therapy, which he insists he’s personally seen help “hundreds” of people.</div>
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“Alan Chambers does not have an understanding of what sexuality and sexual orientation really is,” he says. “He’s not educated. You have an unqualified person leading this organization who does not have the answers, and therefore he’s throwing his hands up in the air, saying, ‘I don’t know what to do next!’ He should have just resigned and let someone else that’s a more effective leader come in rather than selfishly and narcissistically burying it.”</div>
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Doyle further cautions against reading Exodus’ demise as some sort of cultural bellwether. That said, it’s worth mentioning that he also does not believe that the extremely low turnout at his organization’s Ex-Gay Pride Rally on Capitol Hill on July 30 — 10 people showed up — was a sign of the movement’s decline, but rather a product of the fear of retaliation from the forces of what he calls “homofascism.” He doesn’t think the recent shifts in society at large — notably, the Supreme Court’s rejection of the Defense of Marriage Act and “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage — are indicative of a similar shift in attitudes within the ex-gay movement.</div>
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In some sense, Doyle is right. The practical effects of Exodus’ demise are minor in comparison to the symbolic ones: Many of the former member ministries have carried on with the same programs they had before, just not under the Exodus banner anymore. Doyle points to the Restored Hope Network and other ex-gay ministries as evidence of many who haven’t given up the fight.</div>
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“You can’t let this man speak for all these people around the country. There is still a widespread belief among the ex-gay community, a predominant belief, that people can and do change.”</div>
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It’s an odd fact that those who’d disagree with the very core of Doyle’s point might not entirely dispute his assessment of Chambers’ motivations.</div>
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Michael Bussee was one of the founders of Exodus in the ’70s, but he left the group a few years later after he and another founder named Gary Cooper fell in love and pursued a relationship together. (Cooper died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991.) Over the last decade and a half, Bussee has been one of Exodus’ most strident opponents and has been urging Chambers to close the organization down for years. He runs a Facebook group for over 400 “survivors” of Exodus and organized the group that appeared with Chambers on Our America. Despite their opposing stances, he says he’s usually gotten along quite well with Chambers on a personal level.</div>
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“I don’t see him as an evil or mean-spirited person,” he says. “He’s not an overt hatemonger. He’s sincere, really loves his wife, loves his family, and is very troubled by what he calls his own same-sex attractions.” He views Chambers as a man undergoing a personal and public evolution — much like the one he himself did roughly 30 years ago. “I think he really believed, like I believed, that if you had enough faith, eventually the change would happen,” he says. “I think, like me, he was also concerned that the church was being very cruel to gay people and what they really needed was help, not condemnation. We thought that was what we were doing by offering them freedom from homosexuality. So it was motivated by internalized homophobia and good intentions, and a denial of the truth about ourselves. I think it got to the point for him this last year that he just couldn’t ignore that any longer.”</div>
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Bussee points out that the history of Exodus and the entire ex-gay movement is riddled with leaders who have undergone this same transformation. In 2011, John Smid, former director of the Memphis-based ex-gay ministry Love in Action, came out as gay and said he had “never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual.” John Paulk, a former chairman of Exodus’ board of directors and founder of Love Won Out, an ex-gay conference affiliated with James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, has come out of the closet, left his wife, and just this year denounced reparative therapy and issued an apology. (He now owns a catering company in Portland, Oregon.)</div>
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Bussee thinks Chambers is likely on a similar trajectory. “He may be going through the same thing that a lot of former leaders go through just before they abandon the whole thing, and [decide] maybe it’s OK to be gay and maybe gay relationships can be blessed by God,” he says. “He’s in the middle somewhere, still trying to figure out where to land. He’s not quite there yet.”</div>
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Wayne Besen, a former staffer at the Human Rights Campaign whose current organization, Truth Wins Out, has long been a chronicler and harsh critic of the ex-gay movement, calls Chambers’ recent moves bold, if incomplete, but essentially agrees with Bussee that it’s just a matter of time before the other shoe drops in Chambers’ personal life.</div>
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“People have a strong motivation and desire to be their real selves,” he says. “Alan is no exception. He’s on a journey. Maybe he never gets there, but very rarely do people go their entire life without experiencing intimacy and love at their very core.”</div>
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Alan and Leslie Chambers have gotten used to living under a microscope and having their marriage dissected by countless prying amateur (and occasionally professional) psychologists. Leslie is completely aware that many bystanders are just waiting expectantly for the day that her husband runs off with another man. But she isn’t.</div>
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“Those people don’t understand that our marriage is real, our commitment is real, our attractions for each other are real,” she says. “There’s a difference between an attraction and a temptation, and an attraction and an action. For him to say on national television that there are lingering same-sex attractions doesn’t send me into a tailspin, because I am completely confident and secure in his commitment to me, our family, and God.”</div>
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Chambers says that his choosing to be faithful to his wife by not sleeping with men is no different than any other married man upholding his marital vows. “I am happy,” he says. “I’m not denying myself anything. I don’t want anything else. I am living my true self. For anybody to think otherwise is inserting themselves into a situation that is not theirs to insert themselves.</div>
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“People can think whatever they want to think,” he continues. “I don’t really give a crap these days. If you think I’m on a journey that’s going to journey me out of my marriage and into something else, there’s never been a thought of that. I don’t want that. You don’t know me. You can keep your opinion to yourself. I am married to the person I am in love with.”</div>
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In person, Chambers and his wife certainly have the chemistry and casual affection of a couple that has been together for a long time. They share a lot of the same interests — shopping, home décor — and seem to see eye-to-eye when it comes to parenting their two children. Is it possible he is exaggerating or outright lying about his sex life? Sure. Might his and Leslie’s relationship be something closer to best friends or even siblings? Certainly. And how exactly would this make them different from countless other couples that have been married for 16 years?</div>
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I ask them if the relentless judgments about their relationship from people who don’t know them has caused the couple to reexamine their own thoughts on same-sex marriages. Chambers pauses before answering.</div>
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“Maybe to the extent that I can’t judge someone and say their love isn’t real or their life isn’t important,” he says. But actually supporting same-sex marriage at the moment is a bridge too far. “The whole promoting and lobbying for the passage of the federal marriage amendment, which I was very much a part of with Congress and the White House, I’ve been sorry about that for five years. I don’t have a desire to fight people on those things anymore, but I’m not going to be their champion either. People don’t need me to be marching in a gay pride parade in support of gay marriage. They may want me to, that might be a great symbol, but I don’t want to do that.”</div>
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That said, he does regret some of his other past political stances, and while he hopes to take a step back from public policy in general with the new organization Speak. Love., there may be points where he feels he has something to contribute.</div>
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“The whole notion of gay adoption — I would work to make sure kids have a home, whether there’s a straight home, a single home, or a gay home,” he says. “I feel passionate about us doing something about the issue of bullying. I feel passionate about kids that are being kicked out of their homes as teenagers because they come out as gay or lesbian. I feel passionate about undoing any damage that we did in Uganda or other countries.”</div>
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Besen, of Truth Wins Out, sees an opportunity for Chambers to take up the LGBT cause and really atone for his past.</div>
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“I was just in Trenton, New Jersey, testifying on a panel about banning reparative therapy for minors,” Besen says. “I would love to have been sitting next to Alan Chambers on that panel. He could’ve stated that reparative therapy doesn’t work and it shouldn’t be subjected to people against their will. So he can do a lot more. When he gets to the point where he’s ready, we’ll have a gigantic red carpet waiting for him. He could be a hero.”</div>
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It’s not clear Chambers is ready for this. At the moment, Speak. Love. is a work in progress. Chambers describes it with a lot of well-meaning phrases, like “a conversation about faith and sexuality,” “modeling civility and respect,” and “transforming churches into places that welcome all people,” but what that will look like in practice remains to be seen. Plenty are skeptical.</div>
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Bussee, the former Exodus founder, is concerned that it is just a rebranding. “They may tone down the anti-gay rhetoric, they may get out of anti-gay politics, but their basic views about homosexuality have not changed,” he says. “Who is going to want to support an organization that is really vague about what they’re even about? He was attractive as long as they were promising orientation change and engaged in anti-gay politics. Conservative Christians loved that. But now what’s he selling? Where is the donor base? Are moderate churches really going to want to give money to somebody who is preaching — what? That celibacy is possible?”</div>
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For this reason he thinks it’d be best if Chambers stepped out of the spotlight, at least for a while. “It’s like, ‘Alan, just lay off. Go put your life together, get out of this whole ministry thing. Get a real job. Enjoy your family. Just leave us alone and deal with this personal struggle you’re having privately.’” Bussee admits that scenario isn’t particularly likely. “What else is he going to do? He doesn’t have a college education. He doesn’t have any marketable skill. These people feel like they’re called by God into ministry but now they’re not welcomed by conservative Christians anymore, and they’re not welcomed by the gay community. How is he going to support his wife and children? One former ex-gay leader I know is now working part-time in the lumber department at Home Depot.”</div>
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Besen says Exodus’ inherent pitch that unhappy homosexuals could change their orientation — while tragically misguided — had an obvious customer base, but Speak. Love., not so much. “With Exodus, people were promised a miracle, and that was very seductive,” he says. “Right now, he’s selling misery loves company, where you get to sit around and talk to people who are just as lonely and sexually frustrated. There’s just not a big market for that.”</div>
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Chambers believes most of his critics are so caught up in the culture wars that they are fighting him almost out of habit. While it’s true that he will need to raise money from donors to fund both his new organization and pay himself, he wants to keep Speak. Love. small and manageable. He isn’t looking to rebuild a network of member ministries and doesn’t want to be in a position of pushing his opinions and beliefs on other people.</div>
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He says that despite the financial uncertainty that comes with founding this new organization, he’s not panicked.</div>
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“Making a living is important, but money has never been a determining factor for any of the things that we did at Exodus. I’m not here to profit off of something. I’m here to do something I believe is right. With the apology and the closing of Exodus, that was the right thing to do. I feel really passionate that we do have a voice going forward and there are people who are listening.”</div>
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He smiles and seems to relax.</div>
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“It’s a leap of faith.”</div>
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And if it doesn’t work out, what then?</div>
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“I’ve begged God for years to let me be a decorator,” he says, laughing. “If somebody offered me a job tomorrow, I’d be tempted.”</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-11623713198864330142013-08-24T18:59:00.001-04:002013-08-24T18:59:11.013-04:00Ranks of Mormon church missionaries hits milestone of 75,000; multiplies with younger recruits<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi-D6aKUcpnoo8XiJb-E2YBDOZruMfQ_NJQZwSdp7Q2HsrVZMsz4rGjOnRGj7XGsbflx_z9WaTZAM0PJsJGCWO-cbasOYGtULJHYoUHDMOqjEwcmtu1hZD6_b1mhaykP7LbOMlsAmx1dMz/s1600/inside_a_troubled_fundamentalist_mormon_sect.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi-D6aKUcpnoo8XiJb-E2YBDOZruMfQ_NJQZwSdp7Q2HsrVZMsz4rGjOnRGj7XGsbflx_z9WaTZAM0PJsJGCWO-cbasOYGtULJHYoUHDMOqjEwcmtu1hZD6_b1mhaykP7LbOMlsAmx1dMz/s320/inside_a_troubled_fundamentalist_mormon_sect.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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(AP, August 22, 2013)</div>
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Salt Lake City - The number of Mormon missionaries surpassed 75,000 worldwide in August, driven by the church’s decision to lower the minimum age for ambassadors of the Utah-based faith.</div>
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reported the number of proselytizing missionaries has increased by 28 percent from about 58,000 a year ago.</div>
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The church expects the number to swell to 85,000 by year’s end.</div>
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Last October, the church announced men could begin serving at 18, instead of 19, and women at 19, instead of 21.</div>
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Church leaders and outside scholars expect the decision will lead to many more women serving missions. Rather than having to leave at age 21 — when many women are about to start careers or perhaps are contemplating marriage and starting families — Mormon women can now serve missions shortly after high school.</div>
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Young Mormon men are expected, but not required to serve missions. Historically, women have faced far less pressure to serve. Men serve two years while women go for 18 months.</div>
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Church scholars say the unprecedented number of missionaries gives Mormons an opportunity to bring in a higher number of converts, and perhaps more importantly, do a better job of keeping current members active.</div>
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The church reported having 14.4 million members worldwide as of January 2012. Missionaries convert about five people per mission, according to Matt Martinich, a member of the LDS church who analyzes membership and missionary numbers with the nonprofit Cumorah Foundation.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10890250374501453106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4047514509552294343.post-70743163351926934292013-08-24T18:55:00.000-04:002013-08-24T18:55:36.213-04:00Islam's ability to empower is a magnet to black British youths<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Abdul Haqq Baker ("The Guardian," August 19, 2013)</div>
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A seminar was hosted last month by Christians Together in England to consider ways to "stem the flight of black British youths to Islam and radicalisation". In an unprecedented move, Muslims were invited to attend – and they did. Together, both faith groups discussed the reasons why a growing number of young black people are choosing Islam in preference to Christianity. According to this morning's BBC Radio 4's Today programme, one in nine black Christian men are converting to Islam.</div>
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Following in my father's footsteps, I was raised as a Roman Catholic and attended Sunday mass regularly as a child. I also attended a Roman Catholic secondary school – initially a cultural shock as I found myself the only black student among a predominantly white class. The religious focus of the school was, however, a refreshing contrast to my urban, street background. Teachers and students were more serious about God than at my previous schools. A student was not considered "nerdy" or "odd" due to their religiosity. I was therefore able to excel in religious studies and was successful in my final O-level exam.</div>
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During these lessons, the more we learned about religion, the more we questioned and challenged particular concepts, particularly relating to Christianity. Questions about the concept of the trinity – the Godhead being three in one – caused many debates as some of us; myself and others did not find this logical or feasible. Our religious studies teacher became exasperated by persistent questions on this topic, and arranged for the local priest to attend and address the question. His explanations did little to remove our doubts in this very fundamental and important area of faith.</div>
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I recall one particular lesson where we were doing Bible studies and I queried why we, as Christians, failed to prostrate in the same manner that Jesus had in the garden of Gethsemane prior to his arrest. I was unable to identify any relationship between Jesus's prayer and ours as his Christian followers. However, the Muslim prayer most closely resembled Jesus's.</div>
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After leaving school, I lost contact with most of my school friends. I also abandoned many aspects of Christianity and instead submerged myself into the urban street culture of my local friends and community – we would make our own religion based on the ethics and beliefs that made sense to us.</div>
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The passivity that Christianity promotes is perceived as alien and disconnected to black youths growing up in often violent and challenging urban environments in Britain today. "Turning the other cheek" invites potential ridicule and abuse whereas resilience, strength and self-dignity evokes respect and, in some cases, fear from unwanted attention.</div>
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I converted to Islam after learning about the religion's monotheistic foundation; there being only one God – Allah who does not share his divinity with anything. This made sense and was easy to comprehend. My conversion was further strengthened by learning that Islam recognised and revered the prophets mentioned in Judaism and Christianity. My new faith was, as its holy book the Qur'an declares, a natural and final progression of these earlier religions. Additionally, with my newfound faith, there existed religious guidelines that provided spiritual and behavioural codes of conduct. Role models such as Malcolm X only helped to reinforce the perception that Islam enabled the empowerment of one's masculinity coupled with righteous and virtuous conduct as a strength, not a weakness.</div>
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My personal experiences are supported by academic research on the same topic: Richard Reddie, who is himself a Christian, conducted research on black British converts to Islam. My own studies revealed that the majority of young people I interviewed converted from Christianity to Islam for similar reasons to me.</div>
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Islam's way of life and sense of brotherhood were attractive to 50% of interviewees, whereas another 30% and 10% respectively converted because of the religion's monotheistic foundations and the fact that, holistically, the religion "made sense" and there were "no contradictions".</div>
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My research examined whether such converts were more susceptible to violent radicalisation or more effective at countering it. The overwhelming conclusion points to the latter – provided there are avenues to channel these individuals' newly discovered sense of empowerment and identity towards constructive participation in society, as opposed to a destructive insularity which can be exploited by extremists.</div>
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Many Muslim converts – not just black British ones – will confirm the sense of empowerment Islam provides, both spiritually and mentally. It also provides a context within which such individuals are able to rise above the social, cultural and often economic challenges that tend to thwart their progress in today's society. Turning the other cheek therefore is never an option.</div>
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