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The Harlot Shall Be Burned with Fire: Biblical Literalism in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

By Sarah Sentilles

…tion, counts as rape. During the second, which is even more brutal, the discomfort in the theater was palpable. I was uncomfortable, not only because I was terrified by watching someone raped, but because it was unclear what I was supposed to make of the violence. It was unclear what kind of gaze the camera was asking me to assume. Yes, Dragon Tattoo makes it clear that rape is wrong. The film also makes it clear that Lisbeth resists, fiercely, as…

Feeding on the Faithful: How Supernatural Thinking Empowered the Third Reich

By Eric Kurlander

…s not easy. Scholarly disciplines have never been more specialized and the competition for grant money and publication more difficult. But if one wants to reach a wide public, one has to strike the right balance between historiographical complexity/originality and accessibility, between exhaustively documented, archival-based primary research and a story-driven narrative unencumbered by too much nuance or detail. If I’ve erred a bit toward scholar…

The Story Behind the Catholic Church’s Stunning Contraception Reversal

By Patricia Miller

…cussion. In 1963, Pope John XXIII, who had succeeded Pius XII, appointed a commission that would eventually comprise fifty-five members, including five married Catholic women, theologians, priests, and physicians, to study the question of whether the church’s teaching on artificial contraception should be changed. There is some indication that he created the commission as a way to isolate the incendiary issue of birth control from the Vatican II p…

Dispatches From the Rhodian Shore: A (Tough) Love Letter to Religious Studies

By Todd LeVasseur

…st of the foreseeable future. The possibility of more rapid warming in the coming decades is very real, too. This is because the oceans are becoming saturated with excess heat which will remain in the atmosphere once they’re fully saturated. It’s also because at some point in the future permafrost will start thawing and releasing methane. Sound alarming? Not when we get to data point number 2. 2. Basically, we are not alarmed enough. Not by a long…

Blood and Politics — Christian White Nationalism in the Age of Obama

By Bill Berkowitz

…ng only a common set of hatreds. Rather, this is a single movement, with a common set of leaders and interlocking memberships that hold a complete and sometimes sophisticated ideology. Further, the White nationalist movement today is organized around the notion that the power of Whites to control government and social policy has already been overthrown by people of color and Jews, rather unlike the Klan of the 1960s which sought to defend a system…

‘Miracle’ in Manila

By Jonathan T Chow

…redit for this are the brazen nature of the alleged crime due to the sheer number of top officials implicated and the fact that it comes on the heels of the 2005 “Hello Garcia” scandal in which President Arroyo was accused of rigging the presidential election in her favor, leading to a failed impeachment attempt by the Congress. President Arroyo and her associates in Malacañang, the presidential palace, have also provoked popular anger because of…

The Revolution Will Not Be Fetishized: Taking Resistance Beyond the Spiritual Industrial Complex

By Andrea R. Jain

…erve certain neoliberal, conservative, or nationalist agendas, there are a number of commitments that many of them claim to embrace. These include commitments to the following: religious and cultural pluralism, gender equity, racial and sexual diversity, environmental sustainability, scientific inquiry and historical-critical commentary, and a public space that guarantees both freedom of and from religion. Hence, I am certain the number of self-pr…

A Question for Hobby Lobby Supporters…

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…oyer at a safe moral distance from the act, where previously they had been complicit? If so, what’s the number? How long does the list of possible uses have to be to assuage the employer’s conscience enough to let the employees use their compensation for things the employer finds morally repugnant? See, here’s the thing I’d prefer not to believe—because I actually don’t like being cynical, despite how well it often plays on the internet. I’d prefe…

The Conservative Bible Project: Looking for Conservative Diamonds in a Liberal Dung-Hill

By Thomas Fabisiak

…ey (presumably) didn’t want to call temptresses. Ancient Greek had a rich, complex vocabulary, including a complete vocabulary of sexual terms—they had words for temptress, slut, prostitute, dancer, etc. The author of the Gospel of Mark chose to use the word that unequivocally means “little girl” instead of one of the many less savory words he had available, and yet you think you know better what he meant to say? That’s not creating an unbiased tr…

Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism is More Kosher Than You Think

By Seth Sanders

…ingdom. In keeping with these admonitions, Maimonides does not include any command to settle Israel among the 613 commandments Jews are divinely obliged to keep, and authorities from the medieval Ashkenazic Pietists (who transmitted much of the earliest known mystical literature) through 15th century Spanish Kabbalists held to it. Theological resistance to the early Zionist movement was thus based in the mainstream of Jewish tradition. This resist…