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The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

Over the past few days I’ve seen a number of references to “America’s Birthday” coming up on Friday. If a commercial advertiser wants to say this, fine (I guess). But I have spotted a couple of otherwise sober-minded writers using the “birthday” tag as well, and their ignorance is more disturbing. July 4, 1776, was in no way the birthday of anything. It was the start of a long and savage struggle against the world’s most powerful empire at the ti…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…

The Catholic-Evangelical (Non-)Coalition

By Patricia Miller

…of trends, 40% of Catholics supported same-sex marriage in 2001 with that number increasing to nearly 60% by 2014. By contrast, only 13% of Evangelicals favored same-sex marriage in 2001 and just 23% approve of it today. Writing in The Atlantic, PRRI’s Robert Jones gets at the truth behind these numbers: “there is more support for official Roman Catholic Church positions among white evangelical Protestants than among Catholics.” But, as he notes,…

The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required

By Kelly J. Murphy

…sometimes these afterlives are awful, created out of fear and some two thousand years of failing (often) to ask the right questions about the text(s) we are reading. I came to teaching zombies late in the game in the spring of 2014, when zombie courses had long been on the books at a number of institutions across the United States, in literature courses and sociology classes and beyond. Scholars like Kim Paffenroth and Kelly Baker, among others, h…

“Can You Tell Me Who The Villains Are?”: Rock and Religion, Irish-Style

By Lisa Bitel

…She feels examined by their eyes Is she right or is she wrong? She’s got a number in her pocket And one change of clothes Her innocence is fading Like last years winter snow’s Light a candle in the window So she can see it from the road With all the loving in your heart Welcome her back home. The Docs’ keening for a fallen innocent seems all too prescient, given the recent negotiations over revelations of priestly sexual abuse of both girls and bo…

Conservative Republican Muslim Condemns Fox Report on Congressional Staffers as “Anti-Muslim Bigotry”

By Sarah Posner

…s Dennis Hastert, also a Republican, and Nancy Pelosi. Over the years, the number of people attending grew, eventually leading to the creation of the CMSA around 2007, when Khan has already left Hill service and was working in the Bush administration. Like other Congressional staffer organizations, the CMSA does not receive any funding or support from the government; rather the status permits it to use space and provides a structure for leadership…

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…what’s going on, but too few seem capable of saying it. We now have a fair number of political and civic leaders who are willing to say the word trauma and talk about the all-pervasive violence in this culture, not to mention the extent of mental disturbance and the fact that American civilians have more assault rifles in their possession than does the U.S. military. All well and good. But we have too few leaders who will talk about the deeper roo…

Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

By Eric Vanden Eykel

…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial clai…

Post-Election, “Is The Black Church Dead?” Redux

By Anthea Butler

…ssioned “preacher voice” was not enough to draw black voters out in record numbers as they did in 2008, even though a poll in the New York Times showed his favorables to be extremely high in the African-American community, while he is losing traction with other groups who voted for him in 2008. Issues in the community surrounding foreclosures and unemployment are likely to continue. If the black church writ large is to have any stake in the 2012 e…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…them. That’s what severed the relationship. Academic Quality A surprising number of courses asked little more of students than to memorize Bible verses or learn basic details of biblical stories so that they could fill in the blanks on tests. Some made very questionable choices about the use of classroom time, such as the course that spent two days watching “the historic documentary Ancient Aliens,” which presents “a new interpretation of angelic…