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What the Lost Finale is Really About

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…efore the finale sinks in. What then am I offering in the midst of the hullabaloo? Why write before it is over? Why write at all? Because the ultimate response to the show’s questions have already been answered. The ending of the finale is (spoiler alert) not important. There are no answers that can be given that will leave anyone feeling satisfied. It’ll be like a Thanksgiving feeding frenzy: gobble it up and think we are satiated, but an hour la…

Penn Jillette’s Signs You May Already Be an Atheist

By Steve A. Wiggins

…God, No! was published, to great acclaim. As of October it ranked #273 in Amazon’s book sales category. (Those of us whose books are ranked down in the millions can’t help but feel a little pang of jealousy; it does tell us, however, who is getting read!) Jillette is the vocal member of Penn & Teller, the bad-boy magician duo, and a noted iconoclast. Largely a ramble through his inner monologue, God, No! is the first book to cause me to laugh out…

The Religious Implications of Nudity

By Steve A. Wiggins

A TSA pat-down—security never felt so good! Or so bad. “But it’s against my religion,” I explain to the stern-looking officer who is directing me to the full-body scanner with a gaze that would stop Superman. I feel as if I have been profiled. A man traveling alone, looking like he has nothing to lose (people tell me I should smile more). It is a lazy weekday morning in the Raleigh-Durham Airport and I am returning from a business trip I didn’t r…

Celebrate Jesus with Weird Merchandise!

By Gwynne Watkins

…eptions. One is the Oriental Trading Company. Founded to create cheap plastic toys for carnivals, OTC is now a leading supplier of cheap plastic stuff for church groups and Christian schools. Their party supply catalog always contains a small section dedicated to Jesus merchandise, which results in some odd juxtapositions. Here, for example, are the current most popular category themes on the OTC website: …

Memo to David Brooks: Francis Is Not Naïve For Criticizing Capitalism

By Peter Laarman

…ts better and better with the moneymen in charge. Francis shows that he is aware of this, whereas Brooks does not. He cheekily gives us a defense of fracking as a very good public outcome flowing from individual greed. You have to give him credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign ener…

How Not to Support Obamacare

By Peter Laarman

What’s striking about the president’s pirouette on the ACA, and about Democratic disarray in the face of the renewed GOP assault in the House, is the absence of any open discourse on the underlying ethics of health care. I’ve heard just a few commentators say, and rather gingerly, “Ummm, if the young and healthy people don’t participate it kind of defeats the idea of how insurance works. Ummm, it’s like the kids need to pay a little more so other…

Abortion and the Stories Clergy Tell

By Dennis S. Ross

…a burial service for a man I didn’t know and a family I’d likely never see again. The son of the deceased, a grandfather himself, scanned the nearby graves and pointed to an inscription for a 23-year-old woman who died in 1931. “My aunt passed before I was born. She had an illegal abortion,” he said as if our unfamiliarity gave him permission to unearth a family secret. “What a shame,” was all I could muster, having heard the start of a story I di…

By the Way: Mitt Romney’s Coming Out

By Randall Balmer

…s right, Kennedy’s two central arguments—unequivocal affirmation of the separation of church and state and the promise not to use taxpayer funds for religious schools—were unavailable to Romney. Leaders of the religious right reject both of those fundamental American principles. Romney’s refusal to engage the issue of his faith has made him appear evasive, which only exacerbates the impression that he’s a wind-sock politician who expediently chang…

Hookers for Jesus: Sex and Salvation on the Strip

By Nicole Greenfield

…” those still in the industry. Lobért, a curvy peroxide blonde, has been unabashed in flaunting her God-given gifts to draw attention to her Vegas-based ministry, Hookers for Jesus. At the 2008 Adult Entertainment Expo, for example, a 40-year-old Lobért (dressed in a tight black tank top with strategically placed pink letters spelling “HOOKERS” above a silver ichthus) confronted some of the industry’s most renowned promoters alongside Heather Veit…

Updated: My Work on Confederate Monuments Leaves This Christian Ethicist Distrustful of Calls for Reconciliation and Healing

By Ryan Andrew Newson

…guage that fits with easy calls for bipartisanship and unity. The main takeaway of his speech was that the United States is better than this, and that the nation needed to return to what it has always been—decent and honorable. This sentiment, of course, flies in the face of what we witnessed today: Twelve Republican senators and dozens of representatives (representing millions of American voters) objecting to Biden’s victory, denying that his ele…