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Celebrate Jesus with Weird Merchandise!

…tween the bunnies-and-eggs version of Easter, and the church-service version. Merchandisers are wise to define Easter by marshmallow chicks and colorful baskets, rather than bring theology into it. But there are always exceptions. One is the Oriental Trading Company. Founded to create cheap plastic toys for carnivals, OTC is now a leading supplier of cheap plastic stuff for church groups and Christian schools. Their party supply catalog always con…

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Updated: My Work on Confederate Monuments Leaves This Christian Ethicist Distrustful of Calls for Reconciliation and Healing

…talked about as statues of and for white supremacy, bolstered by a highly sanitized and selective narrative about the past. But another, sometimes overlooked, function of Confederate monuments was the way they served the cause of “healing.” That is, Confederate monuments stood as trophies of a cheap reconciliation where white people of “both sides” of the war could celebrate each other’s mutual valor. Perhaps they would never agree on who was in…

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Who’s to Blame for BP?

…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…

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The Economy is Racism: Ending Race-Based Economic Violence is the Real Challenge of This Moment

…ntative of a faith tradition that on the whole has been more than happy to sanctify the American System of white male supremacy and cheap labor. No one disputes that the current upsurge in anti-racist activism is about police violence. But behind that everyday horrific violence lies the equally horrific shadow of an economic violence that is constitutive of the American Way—and that has been constitutive since forever. Most thought leaders among t…

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Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

…craftsmen’s guilds of stonemasons in late medieval Britain. Like most artisans, men who built in stone wanted to limit their craft to those who had been properly trained, and so created a guild with a system of secret words and signs by which master craftsmen could identify one another. Masons were mobile, traveling long distances to the building sites of castles and cathedrals. They were detached from ordinary medieval society and regarded with…

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“Reconciliation” With Indigenous People is Comforting For Many Canadians, But is a Christian Concept Up To The Task?

…then it has to begin by tackling the question of land. Swampy, virgin, and cheap Canadians who tell stories about land in a public setting can no longer do so while ignoring that they (we) are treaty people—that Canadians live in nation-to-nation relations with Indigenous peoples. As treaty people, part of the responsibility of settlers is to know and tell stories that acknowledge Indigenous land is the very same territory that they also call home…

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Memo to David Brooks: Francis Is Not Naïve For Criticizing Capitalism

…sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or perhaps of churchly antimodernism. What he fails to consider is that the Catholic Church, along with the wider Christian tradition going back to Jesus himself, have never been at ease with the wonderworking power of indiv…

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Are American Christians “Persecuted”?

…hey don’t have it as bad as gays in ISIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed. At Patheos, Benjamin Corey shakes that cheap argument awake: Can we stop complaining about this bogus idea that American Christians are persecuted now? I mean, really. Can we stop? The world needs us to turn from ourselves and focus on this real persecution, because it’s evil and must be exposed and stopped. However, our own self-centeredness as Ameri…

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Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

…works.” Such savvy, so removed from MIT or the complexity theorists at the Santa Fe Institute, runs in tension with Bousquet’s master narrative that links scientific war-making with elite scientific fads. But works like Olivier Roy’s Globalized Islam show how network-consciousness has infiltrated contemporary Muslim cultures through informal theology, preached from Jakarta to London in audio lectures and online forums. The traditional concept of t…

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Hookers for Jesus: Sex and Salvation on the Strip

…fans among the expo’s 40,000 visitors. “Some Christians Think We are Just Cheap Harlots” “A lot of guys pose for photos with us and when they go home and look up what’s on our T-shirts, they learn what we’re about,” Lobért explained to Telegraph reporter Philip Sherwell. “We call it booby-trapping.” But those who attend adult entertainment fairs aren’t exactly Lobért’s target audience. Her conspicuous appearance is also meant to attract the other…

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