Arts & Culture
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These field notes of a fictional ethnographer on an imagined planet touch on a truth: As a woman who was conditioned to see God as father, my role as a Christian was shaped by the nature of a father relationship. And while this may not inherently be harmful, it is limiting. In The Left Hand of Darkness, I was invited to step into and imagine a world where gender was not a burden, privilege, or factor — for me, or for God.
Victim Rachael Denhollander (L) embraces prosecutor Angela Povilaitis at the sentencing hearing for Larry Nassar, a former team USA Gymnastics doctor who pleaded guilty in November 2017 to sexual assault charges, in Lansing, Michigan, U.S., January 24, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
"As we were being sexually violated even as very young children, as young as 6 years old, Larry was sexually aroused by our humiliation and our pain. He asked us how it felt because he wanted to know. What was done to myself and these other women and little girls and the fact that our sexual violation was enjoyed by Larry matters."
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The charges come in the wake of the publication of a report by No More Deaths and La Coalición de Derechos Humanos that indicated at least 3,586 gallon jugs of water destroyed in the desert region near Arivaca, Ariz., by U.S. Border Patrol agents between 2012-2015.
“Yes. I saw water bottles stabbed," Miguel, a migrant from Sinaloa, Mexico, said in the report. "They break the bottles so you can’t even use them to fill up at the tanks. I needed water, some of the other people in the group needed water, but we found them destroyed."
Image via Rebekah Fulton/Sojounrers
The Women’s March in 2017 was one of the largest protests in history. Why is it that coworkers and friends who are active in social justice movements did not even realize that the march was taking place again this weekend? Why is it that I am still explaining why it was important for me to attend?
"The president has an extramarital affair with a porn star, right after his wife gives birth to a son, then he pays the porn star to shut up! Does it even matter to, say, his evangelical base?"
Kenan Thompson, playing a contestant, clicks his buzzer and says, "To evangelicals, of course it matters, it's against everything that they stand for."
ENH.
"You'd think so, but no," says a beleauged Chastain. "They say he's just repented, and they forgive him. And Mike Pence is like, 'This my dude!'"
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For Augustine and his followers, attention was a rare and valuable experience, perhaps even more than for us since they associated it with the divine. One might expect that as a result they should have simply dismissed distraction. But they didn’t.
3. Pope Francis Marries Couple in Impromptu Ceremony Aboard Papal Plane
The pontiff offered the couple a hand-written wedding certificate.
Image via 'Walking While Black'/Facebook
"When a black man gets shot and killed on the side of the road for doing nothing other than being black, and no one says anything about it but maybe some black people for a little while, and then it goes away, the church has not done enough. It has done nearly nothing."
Image via "I, Tonya"/Facebook
From rural, residential life to news cameras to FBI investigations, I, Tonya is a sweeping view of an America that has barely changed since 1994, and certainly hasn’t improved much. It’s a film about how, in the words of screenwriter Steven Rogers, “America wants someone to love, but they also want someone to hate.”
A new interactive investigation from Al Jazeera uncovers a dirty money trail in Ukraine.
5. Your City Has a Gender, and It’s Male
Why city designers are increasingly thinking about the female perspective.
Image via World Vision/Kari Constanza
During his tenure, World Vision grew to collect $1 billion in annual revenue in 2017, making the 67-year-old ministry No. 15 on Forbes’ list of the nation’s largest charities. The agency’s statement on Stearns cites its “two million supporters, child sponsors, and partners and says it is on track to serve 30 million children by 2022.”
That track was nearly derailed in March 2014, however, with a blowup in Christian evangelical circles over how World Vision would deal with LGBT employees.
“In the midst of the critical national conversation now taking place on issues of sexual harassment and assault, this survey shows that young Americans in their teens and early twenties see serious negative consequences flowing from traditional depictions of masculinity,” Robert P. Jones, CEO of PRRI, said. “Young women, in particular, are worried that these expectations carry within them the seeds of sexually aggressive or even violent behavior.”
Image via Reuters/Mario Anzuoni
I hope we stop spreading the dangerous myth that abuse and harassment doesn’t happen among Christians.
Image via Paul Drinkwater/NBC/Handout/Reuters
The night belonged to Oprah.
2. From Evangelicals to Witches: How Religion Shaped 2017
Vox highlights four major religious trends, shifts, and changes in 2017, and ends with a little dose of optimism for 2018.
3. Real Gratitude Shouldn’t Be Easy: On ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’
“At our frequent worst, gratitude isn’t something we feel so much as calculate, tallying our advantages to weigh against the miseries of others. In the privacy of our own minds, our gratitude can bear a family resemblance to schadenfreude—a secret reassurance that others will always have it worse.”
2. Bringing Light to Our Nation’s Very Dark Night
“We feel the chill in our souls. We taste the darkness all around us. It’s important to remember: It’s only temporary. The light is still there – dimmed but never extinguished, ready to warm and lead us all over again, if we let it.”
A gorgeous photo essay featuring Bjorn Nilsen, the man who drives 125 miles every day to deliver mail to the residents of the isolated Lofoten Islands. “Among older residents, who suffer most from isolation, he might be the only person they see for days."
Image via Hafiz Johari/Shutterstock
I ask myself how we got here, why the American church has hardened its hearts to refugees when one of the major themes of the Bible is welcoming the stranger. How did we lose trust in a vetting system that has worked for decades? How did we begin to see refugees as dangerous when there is no statistical evidence to back it up? How did we forget that so many of us are descendants of people who were oppressed and looking for a better life? How did we stop seeing the beauty of American culture as coming from a collision of cultures? How did we lose our way — did it happen overnight or has it been slowly brewing for a long time?
Image via Star wars: The Last Jedi Trailer
In this sense, Star Wars: The Last Jedi is an Advent movie. Director Rian Johnson’s wildly fun and thoughtful entry into the Star Wars canon finds its heroes at a precarious turning point. The film makes its characters grapple with the flaws of their established order, consider whether any of it is worth saving, and move forward by embracing the hopeful qualities of the Force and the Resistance.
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The study “highlights how policies can have effects far beyond, perhaps, the individuals that are targeted by those policies,” Samantha Artiga, director of Kaiser’s Disparities Policy Project and co-author of the study, said. “We really hear how those feelings of fear and uncertainty have impacts on their health.”
Image via LNP Media Group / RNS
The former disc jockey-turned-pastor founded Creation Festival in 1979 after he had a vision of “thousands of kids on a hillside,” he told RNS as the festival celebrated its 25th anniversary. It grew from attracting 5,000 people to a park in Lancaster, Pa., that first year, to annual, multi-day events in both Pennsylvania and Washington state.