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Republican Scandals Drag Secretive ‘Family’ Into the Big Time

By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston

…threat that The Family poses won’t sink in. So—how do we interrupt business-as-usual and provide an alternative to the reigning narrative? JS: The single most valuable point made in Empire, the paradigm-shifting argument by political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is that the days of what might be called hard empire—enforced occupation armies and viceroys and gunboats—have given way to a form of soft empire that “presents itself not as…

Resurrection of ‘Comstock Laws’ Would Threaten Access to Abortifacients — But Even That Fear Misses Bigger Picture

By Gillian Frank

…t in most cases, women sought to terminate unwanted pregnancies by the tens-of-thousands. Some sought out illegal providers. Others self-aborted. The danger of both was evident in the existence of septic wards devoted to treating botched abortions. One of these was at Cook County’s Public hospital on Chicago’s West Side. It was a 40-bed ward, often filled to capacity, devoted to women injured from illegal abortions. One doctor who did his rotation…

Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

By Jason Josephson Storm

…more cognitive dissonance rather than less.” What’s the most important take-home message for readers? The story of disenchantment we have told ourselves is a myth. We tend to the think of the “West” as disenchanted. But the majority of people in Europe and America believe in magic or spirits today, and it appears that they did so at the high point of so-called “modernity.” And contrary to what you might think, higher education levels do not direct…

Trump the Totem: Like Other Fascist Leaders, Trump has Turned from Man to Symbol — And That’s the Danger

By Robert P. Jones

…ce (CPAC), clad in a coat and tie paired with American flag shorts and flip-flops, holding the US Constitution in one hand and a magic wand in the other. At the individual level, a plethora of hats, t-shirts, bumper stickers, digital art (often featuring Jesus and Trump), tattoos, and, of course, Trump’s “God Bless the USA”-branded Bible flooded into public spaces. This explosion of symbolic material was the result of the energy unleashed by the B…

Review: Is the Religious Right Dying?

By Laura R. Olson

…es. The preponderance of the evidence does suggest that a religious “middle-to-left” may in fact be resurging in the United States. The proof will be in the pudding: will the Democratic presidential candidate succeed in attracting a broad faith-based coalition of voters in November? Even if the 2008 presidential election does rewrite conventional wisdom about the ideological nature of religion’s relationship to American politics, a nascent religio…

In the Papal Pocket: Benedict XVI and the Press

By Mary E. Hunt

…around in Washington DC and New York City, we hear about the “Pope-Soap-On-A-Rope” but not the people who work in Catholic schools for low wages. We see T-shirts for papal teddy bears, but no hint of the impact of the Vatican’s policy banning the use of condoms, even for those who are HIV-infected. Whether it is a Sunday morning talk show, the front page of a newspaper, or the evening news, I continue to be amazed at how little the Vatican press…

Religion vs. Science: America’s Perilous Fight

By Edward J. Larson

…od created the universe in six days, they maintain, it must mean six twenty-four-hour days; when it says that God created human and all animals on the sixth day, then dinosaurs must have lived alongside early man; and when it gives a genealogy of Noah’s descendants, believers can use it to date the flood to between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago. Despite judicial rulings against teaching it in the public school biology classes, millions of Americans ac…

Refusal of Interracial Couple Shows How Slippery the Slope of LGBTQ Refusal Really Is

By Heron Greenesmith

…n, compared to 70% of Americans overall. There aren’t current data on state-by-state support for interracial marriage, but while 18% of all newly married people in urban areas are married to someone of a different race, only 3% of newlyweds in Jackson, Mississippi are married to someone of a different race, the lowest percentage in the country. And the Mississippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of inter…

Response to Daniel Philpott: the Politics of Religious Freedom

By Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

…sted in promoting religious freedom). It is, rather, an inescapably context-bound, polyvalent concept unfolding within divergent histories in differing political orders. This realization has led us to pose a number of crucial questions to those engaged in the promotion of religious freedom as a stable and singular human right. These questions, explored in detail in the PoRF volume and our other publications, and underlying my own public interventi…

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

By Seth Sanders

…l in bringing Hasidism to the masses, describes political Zionism as an out-and-out denial of central tenets of Judaism; namely that, because it’s the prerogative of God alone to bring a messiah, and because human activity merely usurps his role, placing the state in the role of God indicates that “the Zionists must give nationalism precedence over the Torah.” And rejection of Zionism on the part of many traditional Jews was hardly confined to Cha…