Search for "cheap airline tickets from flint to little rock ar phone number 1-800-299-7264"

The Clenched Fist of Truthiness: Why Religion Won’t Fix This

By Daniel Schultz

…ely you don’t really belong to it. In short, religious belief and practice are marks of identity in American society in the year of our Lord 2017. And as it happens, there is quite a bit of evidence emerging that American politics these days revolves around questions of identity, exacerbated by a growing urban-rural divide. This is what I mean when I say, faith—or the lack thereof—reflects coherent, competing worldviews. Should America be a racial…

End-of-Life Lessons from The Walking Dead

By Ann Neumann

…tates. And we don’t know what to do. If zombies represent our fears, our fears are here to consume us, particularly our mysterious, inexplicable brains. “Monsters become a reflection of anxiety of a period,” Kelly J. Baker, a historian of American religion has written, “Monsters appear when boundaries are blurred.” Baker further explains that, “popular culture helps to create the spaces in which we live, how we construct who is human and who is no…

The Broken Promise of Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘The Goop Lab’

By Daniel Albert Joslyn

…and intuition promise to liberate our consciousness. It is, however, its particular conception of liberation and vision of healing, that separates TGL from the Goopiest of New Age Socialists and the New Left. The series is never quite clear on the nature of the freedom it wants: freedom for what or from what? Because they fail to answer these questions, Goopers fall back on the exact values and structures that caused the alienation in the first p…

Baring Their Testimonies: Mormon Women Get Naked for the Camera

By Holly Welker

…even in the past five to ten years with more focus on modesty as this very arbitrary thing, like, even angels must wear sleeves. Little girls, even from toddler age, have to dress like they’re wearing the Mormon underwear known as temple garments, which is only for adults. I think that’s crazy. So many Mormon women have so many issues with their bodies—as a lot of women do in our culture. But I think that Mormon women have even more pointed, speci…

Swiftboating Obama: The Brown Blob of Black Radicalism

By Jonathan L. Walton

…reotype that a critical mass of Americans are more comfortable with yet invariably fear. Hence, opponents are able to politically balkanize Senator Obama by racially “otherizing” him in the minds of those who view him through skeptic lenses. In recent weeks, some have cast him as Barack “Hussein” Obama, the radical Islamo-fascist who, by virtue of an Arabic sounding name, must sympathize with “the terrorists.” Others have used his relationship wit…

What’s Wrong with Wright’s Words

By Andrew Murphy

…y done, and we have lost that, and need to get it back. All of this seems far, far away from Jeremiah Wright, however. The biblical Jeremiah’s vocation, after all (and Douglass’, and King’s) was not to damn the nation, but to call the faithful back to a right relationship with God and each other, one that, on some level, they acknowledged in their founding promises. In this way, the jeremiad can often claim, with good reason, to represent the most…

On The Kerry Apartheid Comment and the Cycle of Chutzpah

By Sarah Posner

…say Israel is an apartheid system, just that it risks becoming one. These are warnings worth heeding, yet in American politics it remains taboo to discuss them. If you’re a Republican, and seeking a pat on the head and cash inflow from Sheldon Adelson, you can’t even say the word occupation. (Side note: tomorrow the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations will vote on whether to accept J Street, which opposes the occupation, into t…

Devil’s Bookmark: How Not to Defend God

By Bernard Schweizer

…onclusion that the “ancient Near East” was so collectively corrupted that barbarisms abounded. Here’s Timothy Beal about the socio-cultural context from which the Old Testament arose: “Nor do we know very much for certain about the ancient life situations—ritual practices, oral traditions, legal systems—in which these texts had their beginnings.” Sounds a bit more humble than Copan’s assertions about the “fallen” state of “the ancient Near East.”…

Herman Cain Doesn’t Know his Afghan from his Uzbek

By Haroon Moghul

…at the similarity of its name—in his head—to other countries. As if these are imaginary places on an irrelevant map. He argues that Uzbekistan has nothing to do with America’s economy; a “small, insignificant” state—uncritical for national security. Fail. Irrelevant to our well-being? False. In fact, Uzbekistan is not just any other country, and the other “-stans” around it are not merely exotic borderlands meaningless to us. We have thousands of…

Francis Now and Then: The Ecological Politics of Saints

By Beatrice Marovich

…offer for wealthy domestic pets while billions of other creatures in our care are heedlessly slaughtered. Our domestication practices are a disaster. Domestication as an approach to interspecies conflict does not seem like the most valuable lesson to learn from Francis. A wolf at the outskirts of a human community in the contemporary U.S. would not be met with a leash and a bowl. Francis wasn’t quite a “tree hugger,” nor was his particular approa…