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Herd Heroism in an Age of Rebels: The Cultural Roots of the Anti-Vaxxer Movement

By Michael Schulson

…it for any faction—they are, to put it mildly, screwed—and an even smaller number fit into too many factions to be assigned to just one. These are the divergents, and where some see the makings of übermenschen, others see an interruption to orderly society. Our hero, Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley), is a divergent. Cue the rebellion. As dystopias go, it’s all fairly innocuous. Society needs people to fit in a bit; some people don’t; there’s friction…

Everything Was Better When We Had God In Our Schools

By Hollis Phelps

…. Barnett shot and killed another teacher, Eva C. Wiseman, in front of her class. After shooting at a pupil who came to help Miss Wiseman and wounding himself in a failed suicide attempt, he waited in the classroom until a group of farmers came to lynch him. He then ran out of the school building, grabbed a shotgun from one of the farmers and shot himself, before running away and leaping into a well where he finally drowned. The incident was likel…

Is Joel Osteen, Success Mag Cover Boy, Really “God’s Best”?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…s 1,000 visitors are invited to meet him. I apparently missed the seminary class that taught pastors not to get “sidetracked in controversy.” Instead, my classes taught me that it was theologian Karl Barth that counseled pastors to use both the Bible and the newspaper in their preaching, but Osteen will have none of that. Anything that might get in the way of a happy story, or a story about how God wants you to be happy and be the best “you” you c…

Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church

By Mary Fulkerson

…rticular kinds of bodies, particularly relevant for status markers such as class, gender, and racialization. I look at the racialized bodily proprieties “whiteness” in the church community I studied and assess how they intersect problematically with the habituations caused by marginalizing factors such as “race” and disability. This helps me show the gap in the United States between talk and action. Figures show that, as Andrew Hacker said, what a…

“A Feminine Complaint Against Theologians”

By Susan Henking

…more; Saiving quotes Lionel Trilling as well: The American educated middle class is firm in its admiration of non-conformity and dissent. The right to be non-conformist, the right to dissent, is part of our conception of community. Everybody says so… Admiring non-conformity and loving community, we have decided that we are all non-conformists together. In the face of memory and nostalgia, what the phrase “I am a student of theology. I am also a wo…

Are You Doing Your Part in the Baby War?

By Katherine Stewart

…They support politicians and policies that strip poor, working and middle class families of social support. Everything from food stamps to public education to health care are on the chopping block, while they encourage expanded government funding for a large panel of “faith-based initiatives” that are ostensibly intended to transfer the social welfare role from the government to religious organizations. In other words, transferring even more publ…

Anglican Bishops Punish Episcopal Church Over LGBT Inclusion; Secularization’s Role in Moving Latin America ‘Beyond Machismo’; Greek Orthodox Bishop Says Gays Deserve Respect; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ies, and across sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnic, religious and class lines. As a gay man he takes pride in the gains of his friends and colleagues working for women’s rights, Roma rights, transgender rights and the rights of all marginalized communities in Macedonia. And Bekim is well placed to be a leader in the LGBTI arm of this larger human rights movement. He’s ethnically Albanian, Muslim, gay and an adopted child. “I have always s…

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided Explores the Dark Side of Positive Thinking

By Michelle Goldberg

…he economy has brought more layoffs and financial turbulence to the middle class, the promoters of positive thinking have increasingly emphasized this negative judgment: to be disappointed, resentful, or downcast is to be a ‘victim’ and a ‘whiner.’” It’s satisfying, in a cranky contrarian way, to watch a writer as smart as Ehrenreich take aim at something as universally revered as dogged optimism. Yet while America’s obsessive positivity might be…

Mayday’s Demise and the Rise of our Gloomy Empire

By Ed Simon

…ty Bohemians?” In most modern contexts May Day is a celebration of working class solidarity, but for pagans it was a celebration of nature, and for radicals a day for our fellow humans. As unfettered industrial capitalism has found a way to denigrate social relations and the environment alike, it makes sense that we should honor both on a single day. The earth and other people are the legacy of May Day. Morton was a complex character, in many ways…

Why I Will Not See The Help: A Rant

By Rosetta E. Ross

…Methodist Bishop Nolan Harmon justify enslavement to his Methodist Polity class by saying that “somebody had to do the work.” (The economic structure of the South depended on farming and 19th-century farming required vast human labor.) Nolan Harmon was a signatory of the infamous letter from eight Southern white clergy saying Birmingham demonstrations were “unwise and untimely,” which prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to write his “Letter from a Bi…