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The Revelation of Kurt Andersen: With ‘Evil Geniuses’ a Media Mandarin Discovers Plutocracy

By Peter Laarman

…a Bellafante’s piquant “Big City” interview with Kurt Andersen in Sunday’s Times. Andersen’s bestselling new book, Evil Geniuses, amounts to an extended mea culpa for his own inability, and the inability of culture liberals like him, to grasp what said geniuses were doing to remake the political economy from around 1970 onward, but especially during those crucial 1990s, the decade when leading Democrats joined with Republicans in abandoning the id…

Beneath the ‘Wacky’ Paula White Video is a Dark and Deeply Undemocratic World Propping Up the President

By Frederick Clarkson

…enior pastor in 2012. Like Donald Trump, she’s on her third marriage, this time to former rock star Jonathan Cain, best known as the keyboardist for Journey, who with his fellow band members composed the 1981 hit “Don’t Stop Believing”—long before he met Paula White and became a believer. Cain performed the live soundtrack for the Pray for the Nation broadcasts. White was one of a small group of evangelical leaders who backed Trump at a time when…

Why Evolution Should Be Taught in Church

By Paul Wallace

…f science. When I was in third or fourth grade my dad showed me a geologic timeline in a Time-Life book on natural history. My eyes followed its epochs, periods, eras, and eons down the page until they converged on the dark Hadean eon, marking Earth’s very assembly 4.5 billion years ago. I was stupefied. With its boxes and numbers and colors and fine print the timeline seemed to me a thing of great elegance. The words—Ordovician, Silurian, Jurassi…

Lying about Santa: The Irrelevance of Proof to the Holiday Spirit

By Nathan Schneider

…bout-face, after calling Jolly Old St. Nick a lie, Hook announced that the time had finally come for the main event of the evening, the philosophical proof for Santa’s existence. “This is a question that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about,” he began. And, just to know what he was working with: “How many people here have studied philosophy at all?” Just as I was about to raise my hand, self-satisfied yet discreet, all the power went out. From…

Not God’s Army: The Front Lines of the Fight Against Proselytizing in the U.S. Military

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…cals are saying, “I have to comport my zeal to this in accordance with the time and the place and the manner restrictions put forth by the U.S. Constitution and federal and state case law.” But fundamentalists and dominionists say, “Screw that! There is no place, time or manner in which we can be restricted from proselytizing the gospel of Jesus Christ as we see it.” What kind of complaints do you hear about? We’ve had people beaten, denigrated, f…

Our Need for Sports During the Pandemic is Far Deeper Than Just Entertainment

By Terry Shoemaker

…tory of Baltimore. This is a great example of how teams extend well beyond fields or courts into our social lives. Currently, institutional preservers are left uncurated. Beyond entertainment, sports helps us answer the deep questions of life, like: Who are we? What do we do? How do we mark time? In these times of isolation, we’re missing a piece of our self that sports help cultivate. Sports, fandom, and play are essential elements of being human…

Gambian Voters Reject Anti-Gay Strongman Jammeh; Activists Ponder Trump Impact on LGBT Human Rights; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…tical-cum-cultural challenge. The classic case is the variety of laws in a number of countries derived from the colonial era which still criminalize same-sex sexual conduct, even when and where the colonizing power discarded such laws a long time ago. On another front, while care, kindness and consideration are at the heart of religions in their common humanity and linkage with human rights , various interlocutors misconstrue or resort to less tha…

Healed of the Sin of Religion: At Church with Sara Miles

By Lisa Webster

…ng for it. I like the idea that if I simply light the candles at a certain time and say the prayers at a certain time and cross myself in the right way, I will be safe. And I’ll be good. And I’ll be right with God. But that reduces God to an object that can be manipulated by my technology—my words, thoughts, gestures. Or I create an even more complex system in which my priest tells me how to be right with God, and all I have to do is obey the huma…

American Infidel: Robert Ingersoll Was the “Great Agnostic” of the (Last) Gilded Age

By Peter Laarman

…n of creation (they rattled Darwin’s own nerves), Americans in Ingersoll’s time were on the whole less anti-scientific than those of our own time, when just under half of adult Americans tell pollsters they do not accept evolutionary theory. Ingersoll was brilliantly able to allay lingering anxieties about the indignity of human kinship with other species. In his lectures he deftly showed that the idea of an ascending humanity has rather more dign…

No, Rush Limbaugh Did Not Hijack Your Parents’ Christianity

By Kristin Kobes Du Mez

…It started as an occasional hit, maybe just on the car radio from time to time. At first, there was still some critical distance. Not all of the jokes earned a chuckle, and coarse language might induce a cringe, here or there. Over time, however, it developed into a habit, and God-fearing, eminently respectable Christian men began mimicking Limbaugh’s tone and content. Even the crass jokes—maybe especially the crass ones—became funnier. At least…