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UPDATED: Turning Catholic School’s Anti-Mask Theology Into a Faith Argument is Just Fine With Religious Right (Even if it is Based on Garbage Theology)

By Daniel Schultz

…s a strategy making for great P.R. and fundraising, but it won’t do much to shift the political landscape, or the case before the Michigan courts. Sadly, not much will, given the intransigence of some people. Sometimes, as the Hebrew prophets knew, the best call is simply to get out of the way and announce the consequences to come. In this case, that probably means a whole bunch of people are going to die unnecessarily. As much as anyone might wis…

Obamunism? The Traditional Values Coalition Coins a Term

By Bill Berkowitz

…um Ministries, recently announced that the winner of its fifth annual the “Best of Festival” Jubilee Award—with its $101,000 cash prize—was The Widow’s Might, a 101-minute film written and directed by 19-year-old John Moore of Kaufman, Texas, with David Heustis and Jeff Moreland serving as producers. The film is “a feature length comedy-adventure that tells the fictional story of how aspiring filmmakers came to the aid of an elderly widow who face…

Atheists Gather in Burbank: A Humanist’s Response

By Anthony B. Pinn

…with their inability for critical self-reflection and critique are not the best champions of healthy life orientations. I remain hopeful that collaboration and partnership will be difficult to achieve but not impossible. I am not calling for a naïve stance marked by blindness—either to the deep dimensions of our differences, or to the great harm that theistic (and atheistic) perspectives can produce when they nurture bad ethics. I left Burbank thi…

Gay Mormons Tie the Knot

By Johnny Townsend

…yman, about a gay Mormon missionary in Italy, was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2011, and my latest, Marginal Mormons, just received a starred review from Kirkus.) I also marched with the Mormons for Marriage Equality contingent this year in Seattle’s Gay Pride parade, amazed to see compassionate Mormons with signs proclaiming “Sorry we’re late!” I belong to Affirmation, an organization for LGBTQ Mormons. I still have my triple combination on a…

The Visceral Vote: Obama-as-Sojourner v. McCain-as-Mythic-Hero

By Ira Chernus

…ters ask “Which candidate has values most like yours?” or “Which candidate best understands and cares about your needs?”, Obama consistently comes out ahead. The McCain campaign’s strenuous effort to make the biracial son of a single mom from Kansas a symbol of “elitism” isn’t working very well. What is working is McCain’s focus on “experience” and on the realm of war, the military, and national security. That’s the one area where McCain consisten…

RD News Round-Up—September 22, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…ns/Simon & Schuster), Freddoso’s book joined Corsi’s on the New York Times best-seller list. As a Political Research Associates’ Right Web profile of Regnery points out, the company, founded by Henry Regnery in 1947 in Chicago, and [i]nitially affiliated with the University of Chicago’s “Great Books” series, … became a leading publisher of old-guard, conservative writers such as Russell Kirk, James Burnham, and William F. Buckley, Jr.“ After being…

Dan Savage and Brian Brown Did It

By Katie Toth

…calling him “dismissive,” and says he overlooks the majority of biblical scholars. He’s also particularly peeved by Savage’s description of biblical perspectives of slavery: “If we want to have a debate let’s do it civilly,” he says. “Let’s look at the best scripture scholar. Sam Harris is not one of the best scripture scholars.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say someone who invites you into their home is lacking civility when they quote a writer you…

RDBook: The End of the World As We Know It

By Gabriel Mckee

…Cory Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”—probably the anthology’s best story—it’s a synchronistic series of unconnected acts of terrorism. The most original set-up is in Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” in which a virus wipes out the human race’s ability to use and comprehend language. Elsewhere the cause of the apocalypse is ambiguous—something best illustrated in Gene Wolfe’s “Mute,” in which two children watch news reports about a mys…

Evangelical “Sexual Purity” Is Not About Sex—It’s About Power

By Sara J. Moslener

…nation in distress and claiming that evangelical Christianity can not only best explain the crisis, but save us from our demise. Is there anything you had to leave out? For a long time I considered writing an addendum about post-purity evangelicals. This is a concept introduced by Abigail Rine who wrote in The Atlantic about the growing number of evangelicals and former evangelicals who’ve been recounting their experiences with sexual purity. Many…

The Meaning of Make Believe (Why Religion Doesn’t Have to Be “Real”)

By Neil Ellingson

…with a late-night walk through the woods behind my parents’ house, and the best way I’ve found to describe that inaugural experience was that the trees looked “more real than before.” When I tried to explain this—and the sense that everything felt more real, including my self—to my college girlfriend, she looked at me with the same scrunched, doubting brow my friends had on that canoe trip years before. And then a strange thing happened. After som…