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Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…ings, angels would seem to be beyond redemption, and belief in them understood as immature, dim-witted, and déclassé. The sort of subject left to supermarket tabloids like The Weekly World News, which in 1996 breathlessly declared, with tongue only partially in cheek, “Airline Pilot Photographs an Angel!,” between a blurry “photo” and a pull quote informing readers that the “FAA launches top secret investigation into incident.” To those who dismis…

A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…. —Dave Barry I love to shop. This questionable passion led me to write a book on shopping. I will also confess, like any good Catholic, that guilt is a motivator here as well. Plagued by a consumerist culture that defines our worth and value by what we spend, yet informed by a Christian ethical vision that attempts to undermine that very ideology, I sought to reconcile the two. In addition, shopping is something that unites all of humanity—it is…

The Contested Religious Powers of Baseball on Display in Cuba

By Sean O'Neil

…Boston Marathon bombing with a resounding and defiant message of unified goodwill against pockets of hate, “This is our f—ing city!” Hence, for much of Tuesday’s monumental matchup between the Cuban national team and the Tampa Bay Rays, Obama was an enthusiastic fan, exchanging pleasant smiles with his neighbor, President Raul Castro. If baseball can re-enchant our frenetic lives with a temporal frame that encourages deep reflection on the “bless…

How Much Did Jesus Care About Sex?

By Peter Laarman

…the point that following Christ (discipleship) means you cannot pick and choose which parts of Christ’s teachings to follow, and that Christ himself was clear enough on the need to lay aside carnality in order to live close to God. Citing Bonhoeffer in this way is meant to clobber Sullivan into submission, obviously. Dreher writes that the loophole Sullivan gives himself on the matter of sexual freedom is the characteristic heresy of progressive C…

Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

By Andrew Aghapour

…tive. I assumed that the system would somehow take care of us—we had paid good money and followed every rule—until our travel agent called with frantic instructions: “You must make this connection. Bribe two Delta passengers! Pay them each $500 for their seat!” A Delta representative sincerely apologized: they couldn’t facilitate bribery. We would have to buy new, full-price tickets to Iran. On the phone with JetBlue’s customer service line that n…

Conservative-Preacher-Turned-Progressive-Leader Carlton Pearson Finds a New Home, Ministry in Chicago

By Jonathan L. Walton

…as no hell in the after-life, only that which we create here on earth. He soon found evidence for his assertion, as all hell was about to break loose within his world of Christian broadcasting. The Oral Roberts family and university where he graduated and sat on the board disavowed him. Charisma publishing house and several Pentecostal organizations denounced him. And fellow evangelists that were once sycophants in his presence distanced themselve…

Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

By Jay Michaelson

…horrible that, like a traffic accident or Qaddafi video, you just have to look. No surprise, then, that a Jewish far-right organization named “Emergency Committee for Israel” has produced a cheap YouTube video showing a couple of crazy people at Occupy Wall Street shouting antisemitic slogans. For good measure, they’ve thrown in Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Eliot Spitzer endorsing the sentiments behind the Occupy movement; ergo, the three of th…

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…atch that dropsy vanish, watch those deficits just disappear, watch those good American jobs fall like manna from Heaven.” He joins this with a very effective appeal to a still-Puritanical American need to avoid indebtedness and accept austerity as the price of redemption. This is what Romney means when he refers to “big things” that need to be resolved. The biggest thing of all, for his purposes, is recovering the will and the capacity to believ…

‘Manufactured’ Smear Campaign Attempts to Intimidate Church ‘Fasting From Whiteness’— It Didn’t Work

By Frederick Clarkson

…church’s front lawn declaring that they were “Fasting from Whiteness.” It took a month for storm clouds to gather into a national smear campaign against the church during the week before Palm Sunday. Articles and broadcasts in rightist media and blogs have led to more than a thousand voicemails—many vulgar, some threatening—pouring into the church as of publication. The church contacted local and federal law enforcement (who they say have been hel…

In a Powerful Statement Black Presidents and Deans Say: No More Stolen Black Lives!

By Pamela R. Lightsey

…d up this statement by a discussion with the Association of Theological Schools. The American Academy of Religion has also responded. Over the days and weeks to come, we have every intention of entering conversations with colleagues and our boards of trustees to put into place concrete new ways of ensuring the eradication of systemic racism in academe. If this work is to be successful, we realize that we cannot limit our work to higher education b…