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Celebrate Jesus with Weird Merchandise!

By Gwynne Watkins

…ly why there’s a such clean break between 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. T…

How Not to Support Obamacare

By Peter Laarman

…one buy approved levels of coverage through the exchanges. Unless everyone participates, we can’t make it work for those at greater risk.” Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t the least bit preachy, but when he spoke people always heard and felt the underlying moral basis for his policies. Obama, a self-proclaimed convert to liberal Christianity, can’t seem to weave a moral narrative to save his life. Oh, and one more thing: This episode should be a wake-up…

NC’s Gay Marriage Ban: “It’s Going to Hurt the Church”

By Nicole Greenfield

…it hasn’t come as much of a surprise that the vast majority of Christians participating in the campaign against the amendment seem to be older, more traditionally affiliated, and familiar with the same rhetorical language that’s been used for decades. One need look no further than 93-year-old Billy Graham’s endorsement of Amendment 1 to realize that the terms of this debate are firmly rooted deeply in the past. “For me, it’s heartbreaking that we…

Who’s to Blame for BP?

By David True

…made it possible for BP to become the monstrosity it has. That’s the easy part. The hard part is considering that judgment does not end safely with BP and Obama. Transcendent judgment continues all the way down to me. I too am guilty. Why do I say this? Well, one only needs to ask why it was that Obama did not act more swiftly to reform the federal agencies responsible for regulating oil exploration. Here one returns to the recent history of susp…

Hookers for Jesus: Sex and Salvation on the Strip

By Nicole Greenfield

…us have drawn their share of criticism. “Some Christians think we are just cheap harlots and tell us so,” she says. “But to be honest, we really don’t care.” Even the television show, which begins with a warning about its potentially disturbing content, seems to favor sex over religion, the hookers over Jesus. “The parts that you will see is what [Investigation Discovery] chose to portray,” Lobért explained to The Christian Post: “There are a lot…

What Will Orthodox ‘Republicanity’ Look Like?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…bate over the debt ceiling and the straw polls have made clear is that the Republican Party is now involved in a difficult battle over its own orthodoxy. Strange as the comparison may seem, what we’re seeing today is highly reminiscent of the shifting landscape of the Christian world in the second and third centuries, and concerns a truism of Christian history: orthodoxy does not appear at the beginning of a movement, it’s the result of a long, an…

“Tell Me What You Believe About Ferguson, and I’ll Tell You What You Believe About God”: A Missouri Pilgrimage

By Anita Little

…ped in St. Louis suburbs dating all the way back to the Manhattan Project. Republic Services, the Fortune 500 company that owns several of the landfills connected to radioactive contamination, insists that adjacent neighborhoods are safe. Rika Tyler of Hands Up United, who said she wouldn’t even give her dog unfiltered city water, feels it’s yet another form of violence inflicted upon the city’s black and brown residents. “When I think of the murd…

The ‘Charlie Charlie Challenge’ and Teenage Yearning for Supernatural Encounters

By Joseph Laycock

…reject. Frightening encounters with the supernatural allow adolescents to “participate directly in myth” rather than hearing about it in church. These rituals may also tighten social bonds by creating a sense of communitas between the participants. The way to discourage teens from summoning Charlie is not to frame their ritual as demonic but as inauthentic. On June 1, just after the phenomenon peaked, the website Uproxx announced that the entire a…

Australian Prime Minister, Church Leaders Resist Marriage Push; South Korea’s Anti-Gay Christians Block Pride Parade; Morocco Arrests Men for ‘Obscene Act’ of Kissing; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…stitutional Court ultimately upheld the act, and today all parties in the Spanish parliament accept legal gay marriage as a matter of course, as do most people in my country. It is important to note that only a few decades ago, Spain was an officially Roman Catholic country where the law defined homosexuality as “antisocial” and stipulated that gay people be confined to rehabilitation centers. Most young Spaniards likely are unaware that this was…

I Grew Up Evangelical and the Christian Nationalist Insurrection Did Not Surprise Me

By Deirdre Sugiuchi

…with the law, my parents sent me to a fundamentalist reform school in the Dominican Republic which practiced conversion therapy, recommended by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. The reasons my parents chose to send me away are complicated, but basically amounted to my having different beliefs than they did, including the right to have autonomy over my body. When I refused to be beaten, my father equated my refusal with rebelling. My parents wer…