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Why Conservatives Really Oppose Federal Aid for the ‘Undeserving’

By Daniel Schultz

…y import, sacrilege, faith and ideology, which is faith’s steely cousin. A number of years ago, I was chatting with the theologian Walter Brueggemann’s then-wife Mary on a Sunday morning. She told me she’d been bemoaning some bit of racial egregiousness or another to her husband, and asked him why he thought people had to be this way. “There are two kinds of people in the world,” he replied. “Those who don’t see an order to the universe, and those…

“Paleo” is More Than a Fad Diet: Boyd Eaton’s Plan to Return to Eden

By Michael Schulson

…ere is a module in our brains, a neurological assembly, that says steak is really good, or meat is really good for us. I mean, it is the best kind of thing to eat. We have mental constructs about what is an attractive woman or what is an attractive man, for mating purposes. We have mental constructs about all sorts of things. If you are walking out onto a beautiful bucolic scene or prairie, a beautiful countryside, you think, “This is great.” If y…

Gay, Christian, Pagan, Artist: How Matt Morris Defies the Borders of Spiritual Identity

By Jesse James DeConto

…hat means. We look to Jesus as an example of that being lived out. I’m not really interested in what happens after we die. I’m not really interested in discussions about our souls being saved. I think that’s all just missing the point. When I think about what it is to be a Christian, it’s about, what does it mean to live in this world? How do you live in this world? I think there’s a connection between Christian practice and a heart for social jus…

This Narrative of Death that is So Powerful Among Us

By Daniel Schultz

…The table of military consumerism is not welcoming, so that the eucharist really contradicts that. Dan: To go back to Cavanaugh for a minute, he has this really interesting idea that the nation-state—which is pretty much what you call the “national security state”—has this need to enforce sharp boundaries. Coming out of that is his understanding of torture as constructing these radically separated identities, and the purpose of torture is to dest…

Gay Black Church: An Interview with Bishop Yvette Flunder

By Lisa Webster

…r a minute. I’m your daughter. And I’m a same-gender loving person. Do you really believe that I’m out of relationship and fellowship with God? Do you really believe that? And she would say, No, I don’t believe you’re out of relationship with God. And I said, So how do you explain me? Because you know me, so you would know if I was somehow completely off-target. How do you explain me? And my mom would say: Well, I really don’t know. But that’s a b…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…s I watched talented African American actors hamming up “African-ness” for cheap laughs. It brought to mind the long, shameful history of Americans—black and white—performing blackness (often in blackface) on stage for white audiences. The Book of Mormon wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of The Lion King and its African stereotypes by substituting more authentic stereotypes. It wants to be transgressive and conventional, blasphemous…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…cation, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourg…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…

Richard Dawkins’ Atheist Academy of Unguided Truth

By Paul Wallace

…e over at Science Progress in response to the same Times profile: “Dawkins really, really, really thinks he’s right about things.” Assuming that’s the case, why not teach children the truth? I mean, if it’s true? Isn’t it good to know the truth, and isn’t it our duty to pass the truth on to our kids? Yes, but apparently the greatest virtue—that children should not be indoctrinated—now trumps even the truth. This seems somehow wrong to me, and very…