On the surface, a recent report by the San Antonio Express-News on an atheist student organization urging classmates to trade in religious texts for pornography seems harmless enough.
The good book of smut?
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Shameless plug for, well, GetReligion
Yes, your GetReligionistas did see that highly provocative piece in USA Today by Rod “friend of this blog” Dreher, the essay that began with this double-deck statement:
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The elephant in the tea room?
On Friday, the Los Angeles Times told us that Christian conservatives and the tea party movement were getting cozy. The same day, Politico told us that evangelicals “fear” the tea partiers. (We looked at those two stories here.)
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Fighting to catch up in Nigeria
Last week, I was pretty hard on a New York Times report about the latest round of quote, “ethnic,” unquote violence in Nigeria. This story was very light on the details when it came to describing the role that religion plays in a nation that is, literally, divided by faith.
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The war on girls
This week we’ve seen two major stories on “gendercide.” That’s the phenomenon of some 100 million plus females having been aborted through sex selective abortion. One appears in the Christian Science Monitor and the other in The Economist.
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More of that 'ethnic' violence stuff
Sometimes, it’s amazing to see how far people will go to downplay the obvious role that religion plays in many parts of the world, for better and for worse.
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Listening to ex-Scientologists
Say what you will about the Church of Scientology, but its members are tenacious. I have some friends who left the church 30 years ago and they are still occasionally contacted by members who encourage them to be careful with what they say. And what’s interesting about that is that my friends actually have many positive things to say about the church and what they got out of it.
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Shameless pre-Oscar plug for moi
Surely, I was one of the last pop-culture-friendly religion writers on planet earth to get around to writing about Avatar.
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What's Christian love got to do with it?
If you’ve heard about the exclusive story that will be in tomorrow’s Haaretz’s Weekend Magazine, the news that for more than a decade a Hamas founder’s son served as a spy to Israel’s security agency, then you’ve almost certainly heard a component of the story that’s two obvious for the media to miss. In fact, this element of the story was its own story — and a good story at that — in 2008.
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