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Pittsburgh Paradox: A City Haunted by God and Steel

By Ed Simon

…han New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.” She understood Pittsburgh’s paradox, a city haunted by both God and steel. The numinous is threaded through Pittsburgh, from the earliest known humans to live in North America at the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter just south of the city through the establishment of the Iroquois Confederation and the revelation of the Code of Handsome Lake; from the arrival of the German utopian visionaries know…

Pricey Tickets, Cranky Citizens, and Priests Behind Bars as Philadelphia Prepares For Papal Visit

By Anthea Butler

…With each twist and turn over the long hot summer in the planning for the papal visit, Philadelphia’s citizens have become restless, and their ire has been focused on Mayor Nutter and the Secret Service. In a hastily put together meeting last week, Donna Crilley Farrell, the executive director of the World Meeting of Families (WMOF) announced that the papal events were going to be ticketed—after having already promoted the Papal visit as “free an…

Mile-High Identity Politics: What We Can Learn From the Same-Sex Seating Controversy

By Eboo Patel

…pecific groups. Women-only, black-only and LGBT-only spaces are a relevant parallel. Such spaces take into account the issues related to certain social identities (the personal) and advocate for a reshaping of the public square to accommodate it (the political). This requires some sacrifice of others. At the very least it means restricting their freedom by not allowing them to enter a certain facility while it is being used by a particular identit…

The Key to Understanding the Federalist Society Isn’t Originalism — It’s This 800-Year Old Tradition

By Peter Schwartz

…ficial positions on matters of jurisprudence and legal reasoning. It never participates in court proceedings, submits no amicus briefs and never serves as legal counsel. Which leads to the insistent claims of legal conservatives that the organization and its originalist methods are politically and substantively neutral. Of course, there’s more than a little bait-and-switch in these claims. From its inception, the official mission of the Federalist…

Shockingly Tone-Deaf GOP Has Evangelical ‘Rabbi’ Pray for Pittsburgh Victims (Updated)

By Daniel Schultz

…even after one of them went too far. It’s easy to believe Trumpists are capable of all manner of evil, but I find it hard to believe even they would go that far. Even if they did, it’s difficult to imagine that a Jewish candidate like Epstein would allow it. Again, never say never, but it seems unlikely. Jeet Heer had a more plausible explanation: that this was part of a bid to erase the specifically Jewish character of the tragedy in favor of a…

Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

…stian principles. This was not a marginal effort; at the 1934 Oberammergau passion play, watching Jesus being hoisted on the cross, the audience saw a parable of the Third Reich, calling out: “There he is. That is our Führer, our Hitler!” Hitler became Christ, the redeemer of Germany, thanks to a reinterpretation of the Gospels: Jesus was not a Jew, but an Aryan who came to redeem them from the Jews who sought their destruction. Karl Adam, the pro…

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…o repentance is for us. Of course, it would feel better if he skipped that part and went straight to grace and salvation, as Beck tries to do but, again, that would not be biblical. Both John the Baptist and Jesus made the call to repentance from both personal and social sin, a central part of their preaching. Without this repentance, there is no grace and no salvation. Beck then goes on to equate Cone’s black theology with Marxism. Here he is wil…

The Resurgence of Right-Wing Anti-Semitic Conspiracism Endangers All Justice Movements

By Ben Lorber

…Marxism theory was enshrined upon the hearth of far-right conservatism by paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, conservative operatives like Andrew Breitbart, and movements like the Tea Party. Today, the cultural Marxism theory is featured regularly on outlets like Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and Infowars, and championed by the right’s favorite pop philosopher Jordan Peterson, libertarian figurehead Ron Paul, and even Brazil’s far-right Presiden…

A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…hing, a toy, a pint of strawberries, or even our morning cup of coffee, we participate in a global economy that values profit over people. Disposable goods are made by disposable people, faceless individuals whose backbreaking and unjustly paid labor produce the goods we consume. What we buy and where we buy it is a political act. It is also, I argue, a religious act. Consumer Theology Religion and shopping may seem like an unlikely pairing, and y…

Are Evangelical Films Destined to Leave Secular Audiences Behind?

By Daniel Silliman

…e success either. The opening weekend saw sales of more than $6 million in tickets. That’s the kind of number that will inspire others to try and figure out the formula for the faith-and-family blockbuster. Yet, with the cost of the film reportedly exceeding $30 million, it’s an open question whether or not the Left Behind reboot will get a second installment. The marketing problem of evangelical movies is still, stubbornly, a problem. The general…