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Mitt Romney’s Best-Known Mormon Critic Tells it All. One Last Time.

…University and I fell in love with teaching. Suffolk was an iconic working-class university—in the 1960s that meant working-class first-generation-college white immigrant families. I had young men negotiating grades with me because if they didn’t get a C, they’d get drafted. I investigated how people avoided the draft and became very aware of class divisions in Boston and America at large. The war really turned me into a social critic, a thinker,…

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God’s Law is the Only Law: The Genesis of Michele Bachmann

…News’ Huckabee show “doesn’t understand the difference between the state’s business and the church’s business,” because he believes in “welfare taking care of the poor, which is contrary to Jesus’ teaching.” Again, that’s a reflection of the Christian Reconstructionist view of God-granted authority—i.e., it’s not within the government’s “authority” to take care of the poor. I asked Titus whether it would be a big moment for him to see Bachmann, a…

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The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

…ionally passing a pedestrian in tie dye or flowy skirts who couldn’t get a ticket, and we’d keep laughing as that person started his or her ridiculous spinning dance in middle of the street. That was their ritual, these Deadheads. Play “Sugar Magnolia” and they’d all start spinning. And we’d look at them and laugh. It goes without saying that teenage girls lack maturity. There is plenty of evidence that they also are cruel. The things I hated as a…

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The Sacred and the Dead: It’s (Not) Just a Box of Rain

…elonging. Home. If only for a few hours, days, until the tour ended or the ticket dough ran out. For many Deadheads, the sonic pilgrimage began when someone placed the needle at the beginning of song 1, side 1 of the Dead’s seminal 1970 album American Beauty. I can’t hear the album’s first track—”Box of Rain”—without thinking about Lindsay Weir in what (sadly) became the final episode of Judd Apatow and Paul Feig’s brilliant, too-soon-gone televis…

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“As Orthodox As They Come”: A Backstage Conversation With Rob Bell

…“constriction at a deep energetic level.” “Institutions arc towards self-preservation,” he said, while “innovations happen in garages.” During the VIP event, Bell praised the startup mentality and told self-deprecating stories. He somehow managed to come across as the consummate outsider while relating a Deepak Chopra anecdote to a room of hundred-dollar ticket holders. We sat down with Bell in the green room an hour before the formal show. In pe…

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Leave It to Trump to Split a Catholic-Evangelical Bloc That’s Generations Old

…ector of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, called the Trump-Pence ticket the “most anti-Catholic GOP presidential ticket in modern history” because of not only Trump’s many shortcomings but also Pence’s record of blocking the Catholic Church’s efforts to resettle Syrian refugees in Indiana. Trump’s poor standing with Catholic voters resembles his “Mormon problem,” as I have written about. Taken together, the Catholic and Mormon rejection…

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Nikki Haley’s Slavery Omission Typifies the GOP’s Tragic Pact with White Supremacy

…e Republican nomination and the presidency by vouching for the Nixon/Agnew ticket to other former Southern Democrats. It was Reagan, who later cemented the alliance between White Southerners and the GOP. This so-called “Southern Strategy” would not only remake the GOP but the entire political landscape of the U.S. And, as was emphasized in a recent town hall event, Thurmond’s efforts are echoed, albeit in a subtler way, in that of another prominen…

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Sacrifice, Suffering, and Rick Santorum

…a child is born with Trisomy 18, to accept, and then care for her. Without reservation, I am in awe of those parents who do. But, why would one risk putting oneself in the position where a Trisomy 18 pregnancy would be statistically probable? Why would one choose, in effect, to take the risk of bringing a doomed child into the world? I am not arguing that such was the intention of Rick Santorum and his wife. But, I am arguing that the political an…

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Leper Messiah: A Jesus Freak’s Search for the Meaning of Bowie—A Critical Novella

…ouraged public displays of beatified passion and, more generally, a middle-class, white (read: toned-down) version of the exuberant call-and-response dynamic that has animated black Pentecostal churches and Southern white revival meetings for generations. On October 25, 1974, as on most Friday nights, Abba’s house band Hebron churned out folk-rock worship music, original tunes that gene-spliced David Crosby and King Crimson—a progressive take on w…

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Obama to Cave on Bush Tax Cuts: Letter to the Washingtonians, Chapter 1

…as a compromise, a letter to the Washingtonians… To the moderate political classes, religious leaders, and activists who are tempted after the Republican gains in the 2010 midterms to call for more compromise, civility, and government sensitivity to the plight of “the least of these”: Late in the year 2000, I stayed up late into the night watching election returns. The hope for a Gore presidency went down hard, like sparks struck from a flint. At…

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