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Pious White Reformers and Race, Then and Now

By Peter Laarman

…with what they regarded as the grave challenge posed by “degraded” Native Americans and African Americans living in close proximity to whites. Guyatt’s book is divided into three sections, each treating a major theme or phase in the white reformers’ efforts. He devotes four of his chapters to “degradation,” three to “amalgamation,” and four to “colonization.” To be clear, most of the white civic leaders who fretted about “degradation” did not bel…

U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…on (or the lack thereof). Msgr. J. Brian Bransfield was elected as the conference’s new general secretary. NCR’s Winters, who has been an outspoken critic of the increasingly culture-warrior posture of the USCCB staff, called Bransfield’s election “a first-class disaster” for the conference. As Winter noted, “The sad and regrettable fact is that the USCCB of late has acquired only the smell of the neo-conservative, upper middle class Catholic shee…

Creationist Rumblings in Louisiana

By Lauri Lebo

…t a committee to study the possibility of introducing creationism into the classroom, his opinion met with general, if unofficial approval. “We shouldn’t just jump into this thing, but we do need to look at it,” Martin said. “The American Civil Liberties Union and even some of our principals would not be pleased with us, but we shouldn’t worry about the ACLU. It’s more important that we do the correct thing for the children we educate.” Meanwhile,…

A Life After Death Double-Feature: Eastwood’s Hereafter and Noe’s Enter the Void

By Jay Michaelson

…drugs and prostitution, whereas the characters in Hereafter live in upper-class Paris, middle-class San Francisco, and the most caring and engaged child welfare system the world has ever known. But the differences are more than skin-deep, especially when it comes to religion. Hereafter goes out of its way to demean traditional religion (and esoteric nonsense) en route to its reluctant affirmation of the afterlife—if the film were a person, she’d…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…who say, ‘Creationism and intelligent design belong in history or religion class, but in my classroom I only teach science. Besides, I’ve got too much information to cover as it is.’ And there’s the rub: science is taught simply as information, as a collection of facts, and as if these facts exist in an ethical vacuum not connected to young Americans’ lives. Not only is this false, but it sets up a tension, a conundrum for these folks living in th…

Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Avatar and the Myth of Originality

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…where to achieve the task of salvation; of power structures based on race, class, gender, and disability; of the colonized and the colonizers; and of the inspirations that come from glimpses into other worlds. All this is not to say “I” agree with its overall message. I’m simply trying to account for its Rorschach nature, and for the ways such mythologies operate, get retold, and establish themselves within the continuum of tradition. Until we can…

Reports of the Black Church’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated: A Review of Walter Fluker’s Latest Book

By Joseph Winters

…ation-state and their commitments to other black people. Because the ideal American citizen is often defined against blackness, being both black and American will continue to be a dilemma until blacks are accepted as fully human. But as Fluker points out, this notion of Dilemma is too narrow to respond to contemporary global realities and conditions. He points out, While Dilemma might have been unavoidable in the past in claiming an African herita…

Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World

By Bruce Wilson

…iod of the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a group of quintessentially American tinkerers grafted new practices of ‘spiritual mapping’ and ‘spiritual warfare’ onto a peculiar and radical theological substrate emerging from the Latter Rain and healing revivals that burst out in Canada and North America during the late 1940s. They molded their hybridized new Christianity into a standardized package of ideas and practices such that, by the late 1…

False Saviors: Trump, Cruz, and the Gospel of the Quick Fix

By Marcia Pally

…ernment logic, nearly 75% of Republican caucus-goers want tax cuts for all Americans (including the wealthiest); 61% want to close the IRS; and roughly 61% want to end laws enacted after the 2008 recession to regulate the finance sector and prevent another crash. One Des Moines resident explained her politics this way: Cruz “wants to let us make choices, instead of the government being all powerful and making choices for us.” Enter Trump and Cruz,…

Challenging Plantation Capitalism: Rev. Barber’s Holy Cause

By Tefere Gebre

…to prosper in the 21st century, and if we want to experience a rebirth of American democracy, progressives must heed Rev. Barber’s call for a Third Reconstruction. We must see and embrace the fusion of demands for racial and economic justice within a broader vision of human liberation. We must unite to achieve “a third act of faith” in the broad sweep of American history. See here for Peter Laarman’s interview with Rev. William Barber, and here f…