Searching in Vain for a “Pure” Elie Wiesel
When they read Elie Wiesel’s Night, my Bible-belt students are regularly caught up short. They…
Read Morekathryn lofton
The Protestant Mainline Makes a (Literary) Comeback
Even with depleted social policy and outreach organizations, liberal Protestant denominations continue to address issues pertaining to war, intervention, and foreign policy; debt relief, foreign aid, and economic development; white supremacism, racial justice, and affirmative action; women’s rights, gay and lesbian issues, reproductive rights, and child welfare; acid rain, ozone depletion, bio-diversity, and eco-justice; and much more.
Read MoreThe Theodicy of George Carlin
Carlin needed a God, wanted a God, but how could the Almighty be all-powerful if “everything he ever makes… dies”?
Read MoreBlack Church Blues: Parting with “The Black Church”
The Rev. Wright controversy begs the question: Has “The Black Church” outgrown its usefulness?
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Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates: The Problem with Popularization
While the history of popularization is a history of regular folk learning about other regular revolutionizing folk and imitating them, comic book histories like The Wordy Shipmates do their part in ensuring that the next generation knows more about Beyoncé than Byzantium.
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Travolta Tragedy: Don’t Blame L. Ron Hubbard
John Travolta’s 16-year-old son is found dead and our celebrity culture is quick to blame the religion of his parents, Scientology. So much harder to face the fact of death, to look beyond the spectacle of someone else’s tragedy and toward our own frailty and error.
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John McCain: No God But Country
The president’s faith, according to John McCain, is “[the] number one issue.” Having scoured the public record, the author reports back with a startling proposal: John McCain may not believe in God.
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A Scholar Responds to John McCain: No God But Country
Did Lofton’s critique go far enough? Was it too measured and neutral? Scholar Mark Hulsether writes that “given the issues at stake in the current election and the huge gap in scholarly persuasiveness between some articulations of Christianity and others, this is a place where my own inclination would be to draw more critics out of the shadows and to give them space to twist their knives harder.”
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