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Category: Religion

‘We come offering bread and prayer, hope for justice and healing — we leave washing pepper spray out of each other’s eyes’

‘We come offering bread and prayer, hope for justice and healing — we leave washing pepper spray out of each other’s eyes’

Religion News Service reports: Last Friday (Oct. 17), the Rev. Hannah Kardon, a United Methodist minister in the Chicago area, stood alongside other protesters demonstrating outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Broadview, Illinois. As a line of Illinois State Police began marching toward her and other demonstrators, gripping wooden batons, footage shows the pastor with her hands raised in prayer. Officers then pushed into the protesters, forcing them back. One officer shifted his stance, reared back and…

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Trump has influenced the culture of the church far more than the church has influenced Trump

Trump has influenced the culture of the church far more than the church has influenced Trump

David French writes: For all the talk of religious revival in American evangelicalism, there is an odd disconnect. Evangelicals might be growing in political power, but there is not much evidence that they are growing in devotion. For example, Ryan Burge, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, analyzed data from the Cooperative Election Study and found that the percentage of self-identified American evangelicals who “seldom” or “never” attend church has…

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Christian Right AFD sees Britain as key bridgehead to empower conservative Christianity across Europe

Christian Right AFD sees Britain as key bridgehead to empower conservative Christianity across Europe

The New York Times reports: For nearly three hours, Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s once-fringe populist Reform U.K. Party, commanded an audience in Congress on Sept. 3 as he testified against his own country’s free-speech rules. The presence of Mr. Farage, a longtime Trump ally, as the Republicans’ star witness in Washington was not merely a symbol of his growing political clout or the power of conservative populism. Rather, it was the result of a discreet, monthslong campaign by…

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Pope Leo urges news agencies to stand as bulwark against lies, manipulation and post-truths

Pope Leo urges news agencies to stand as bulwark against lies, manipulation and post-truths

The Associated Press reports: Pope Leo XIV encouraged international news agencies on Thursday to stand firm as a bulwark against the “ancient art of lying” and manipulation, as he strongly backed a free, independent and objective press. History’s first American pope called for imprisoned journalists to be released and said the work of journalists must never be considered a crime. Rather, journalism is a right and a pillar upholding “the edifice of our societies” that must be protected and defended,…

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The Zionist consensus among American Jews has collapsed. Something new is emerging

The Zionist consensus among American Jews has collapsed. Something new is emerging

Shaul Magid writes: It has been two years since the mass murder on 7 October 2023, an event that shook world Jewry more than any event since the creation of the state of Israel. For Jews it was shocking. For the state of Israel, it was deeply humiliating. The entire Zionist project was founded on the presumption that the Jewish state would prevent things like this from ever happening again. A response was inevitable. But the response Israel pursued –…

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Pope Leo urges Christians in the West to offer migrants ‘hospitality and welcome, compassion and solidarity’

Pope Leo urges Christians in the West to offer migrants ‘hospitality and welcome, compassion and solidarity’

Reuters reports: Pope Leo urged the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics on Sunday to care for immigrants, pressing ahead with a message of welcome for migrants days after criticizing U.S. President Donald Trump’s hard-line anti-immigration policies. Leo, the first U.S. pope, told thousands of pilgrims celebrating Mass in St. Peter’s Square that immigrants should not be treated with “the coldness of indifference or the stigma of discrimination”. The pope, who did not single out any country for its treatment of migrants,…

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Pope Leo denounces people, like Trump, who deny climate change

Pope Leo denounces people, like Trump, who deny climate change

Politico reports: Pope Leo XIV denounced people who deny climate change on Wednesday, arguing that they are contributing to the destruction of God’s creation. “Some have chosen to deride the increasingly evident science of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most,” Leo said. The pope’s comments come just a week after U.S. President Donald Trump, in a speech at the United Nations,…

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Avrum Burg: Israel is committing crimes against humanity ‘under the false banner of our Jewish identity’

Avrum Burg: Israel is committing crimes against humanity ‘under the false banner of our Jewish identity’

Avrum Burg, former Speaker of the Knesset, writes: There is no single definition that defines all who identify themselves as Jewish. Is Jewishness a religion? A gene? A culture? A nationality? A legal status? In the confusion of these overlapping and contradicting identities, modern Israel has forged its own unprecedented synthesis; a fusion of five elements never fully welded in Jewish history: religion, land, power, language, and sovereignty. The product of this Israeli crucible is a cultural mutation that dares…

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The psychology of belief explains America’s ongoing war against evolution

The psychology of belief explains America’s ongoing war against evolution

By Edward White, Kingston University One hundred years after a Tennessee teacher named John Scopes started a legal battle over what the state’s schools can teach children, Americans are still divided over evolution. Scopes was charged with violating Tennessee law by teaching evolution, in a highly publicised July 1925 trial that led to national debate over evolution and education. The trial tested whether a law introduced that year really could punish teachers over evolution lessons. It could and did: Scopes…

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Trump regime injects religion into the federal workplace

Trump regime injects religion into the federal workplace

The Washington Post reports: Federal employees can display religious items at work, pray in groups while not on duty and encourage co-workers to adopt their faith, according to guidance released Monday by the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal civilian workforce. In a memo titled “Protecting Religious Expression in the Federal Workplace,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said that the government workforce should be “a welcoming place” for employees who practice a religious faith. “Allowing religious discrimination in the…

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Unholy alliance: How Hitler forged unity between Europe’s Catholics and Protestants

Unholy alliance: How Hitler forged unity between Europe’s Catholics and Protestants

Udi Greenberg writes: In the middle of the 20th century, a prolonged animosity came to an end. For more than four centuries, the enmity between Catholics and Protestants, known to theologians as the two confessions, had been one of the organising principles of European life. But, then, it stopped. To grasp just how revolutionary this inter-Christian peace was, it’s worth remembering what came before it. Because the mutual hatred between the confessions shaped not only the early modern era, when…

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What it feels like to laugh when the world expects you to disappear

What it feels like to laugh when the world expects you to disappear

Hanif Abdurraqib writes: I sometimes say that I consider myself a junior-varsity Muslim. Whether this comes off as a joke or as an invitation for scolding (spoken or unspoken, loving or otherwise) depends entirely on the other Muslims in the room. But, hey, I say hands up and palms out: I take Ramadan very seriously, more seriously than I take anything. Inside me is still a child of rigorous routine. I don’t drink, or smoke, or use drugs, though I…

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Christian nationalism unleashed: IRS says churches can endorse candidates from the pulpit

Christian nationalism unleashed: IRS says churches can endorse candidates from the pulpit

The New York Times reports: The I.R.S. said on Monday that churches and other houses of worship can endorse political candidates to their congregations, carving out an exemption in a decades-old ban on political activity by tax-exempt nonprofits. The agency made that statement in a court filing intended to settle a lawsuit filed by two Texas churches and an association of Christian broadcasters. The plaintiffs that sued the I.R.S. had previously asked a federal court in Texas to create an…

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Why evangelicals turned their back on PEPFAR

Why evangelicals turned their back on PEPFAR

Peter Wehner writes: In 2006, Ambassador Mark Dybul, then the United States global AIDS coordinator, visited an orphanage run by the Daughters of Charity in Ethiopia. It was a sanctuary for more than 400 HIV-positive babies and young children found in garbage heaps, abandoned on the roadside, or left at the orphanage door. As Dybul and Michael Gerson, then a senior policy adviser to President George W. Bush, walked through the massive campus, they came to the dining hall, where…

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Conservatives who find empathy troublesome

Conservatives who find empathy troublesome

Elizabeth Bruenig writes: Five years ago, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan during a podcast taping that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” By that time, the idea that people in the West are too concerned with the pain of others to adequately advocate for their own best interests was already a well-established conservative idea. Instead of thinking and acting rationally, the theory goes, they’re moved to make emotional decisions that compromise their well-being and that…

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Sean Feucht, the Christian rocker at the center of MAGA

Sean Feucht, the Christian rocker at the center of MAGA

Ali Breland writes: After wildfires erupted in Los Angeles County earlier this year, a team from the Department of Housing and Urban Development descended on the wreckage. Led by HUD Secretary Scott Turner, the entourage walked through the rubble in Altadena, reassuring victims that the Trump administration had their back. At Turner’s request, a Christian-nationalist musician named Sean Feucht tagged along. “I can’t overemphasize how amazing this opportunity is,” Feucht had posted on Instagram the day before. “I’m bringing my…

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