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Celebrate Jesus with Weird Merchandise!

By Gwynne Watkins

…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…

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

By Peter Laarman

…truly “free” economy. [For this reason it mystifies and infuriates me that none of the lead pieces in the new installment of “The America We Need” in the Times mentions race as the primary driver of this ugly aspect of American exceptionalism. This piece by senior editor Kevin Delaney is typical: he mentions how those clinging to the bottom rungs of the economy are disproportionately Black and brown, but that’s all. Perplexing that the Times could…

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

By Pamela Klassen and Joseph Wiebe

…e in 1878. Both claims included land that would instead be reserved for Mennonites. If Mennonites want to say that their (our) identity is bound up with buying land, then they need to reckon with the injustice of the undeserved advantages on which this identity is built. Settler colonialism doesn’t refer to something that is over and done with, but rather to a persistent way of relating to places and people that obscures and denies Indigenous conn…

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

By Peter Laarman

…credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign energy 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 perhap…

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

By Ryan Andrew Newson

…ry process of truth-telling and the material righting of wrongs. Rather, a cheap reconciliation was rendered, which served—at the beginning of Jim Crow, no less—to hide our continued animosities from ourselves, rejecting one of the major opportunities this nation has had to face what Eddie Glaude, following James Baldwin, calls “the lie.” It is now relatively well-known that most Confederate monuments were constructed at the height of lynching and…

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

By Nicole Greenfield

…-gay Christian perspective is still the easy go-to. “It’s a strange phenomenon,” he told me: “I really do think that in the long run it’s going to hurt the church, and shrink the church in numbers. We’re supposed to be known for our love for one another, and for our compassion, and this is just not it.” Many younger Christian communities around the country would agree with Bakker, and have adopted the kind of positive, inclusive messages he refers…

Hookers for Jesus: Sex and Salvation on the Strip

By Nicole Greenfield

…ontrol their own destiny,” Chip Berlet at Political Research Associates, a nonprofit that tracks right-wing networks, commented. “They’re trying to stop women from sinning.” It is important to note, however, that not all evangelicals committed to countering sex trafficking are as politically conservative, or even as overt, as Horowitz and his allies, for whom the trafficked woman becomes a symbol of moral decay and grounds for speaking out against…

Who’s to Blame for BP?

By David True

…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…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…ooks is the hint that there is some profound reality underlying all of the cheap fun. Beneath the nonsensical lore and pseudoscience of The Lost Symbol is a sincere sense of hope. The narrator tells us that in the hours after the September 11 attacks, the random-event-generators in noetic scientists’ labs behaved unusually; “as the frightened world came together and focused in shared grief,” the machines’ random outputs became orderly and patterne…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…turns out to be a sham. Bousquet chronicles how clockwork tactics couldn’t stop Napoleon’s cannons, how thermodynamics brought on an age of assured nuclear destruction, and how cybernetics produced a Vietnam War fought in terms of bombing raids and body counts instead of human politics. The ways of scientific warfare (or religious, or cosmic warfare) make war comprehensible enough to be possible in the first place, but they also, as Bousquet’s boo…