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Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…. Although some American Masons undergo the Knights Templar initiation ceremony, most do not; it is part of a system of “higher degrees,” a later development that certain Masons added onto the society’s original structure. We may forgive Brown these inconsistencies, though, since he at least presents us with a real Masonic ceremony. Considering that Dan Brown’s last two books offer a paranoid conspiracy theorist’s tour of Catholicism, with secret…

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

By Ryan Andrew Newson

…owing James Baldwin, calls “the lie.” It is now relatively well-known that most Confederate monuments were constructed at the height of lynching and Jim Crow. For this reason alone, statues erected at this time are rightly 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 o…

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…

Interview with Karen Armstrong

By Andrea Bistrich

…are troops, tanks, and occupying forces on the streets. Do you see any common ground between Western world and Islam? This will only be possible if the political issues are resolved. There is great common ground between the ideals of Islam and the modern Western ideal, and many Muslims have long realized this. At the beginning of the 20th century, almost every single Muslim intellectual was in love with the West and wanted their countries to look…

Health Care Acrimony Will Only Get Worse

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…classic prophecy in this area requires him to be a Jew. But wait, there’s more: The full results of the poll are even more frightening: including news that high percentages of Republicans—and Americans overall—believe that President Obama is “racist,” “anti-American” “wants the terrorists to win” and “wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one-world government.” The “Hatriot” belief that Obama is a “domestic enemy” as set fo…

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

By Pamela Klassen and Joseph Wiebe

…ominently featured. Thankfully, however, the voices of Indigenous journalists and writers such as Connie Walker, Angela Sterritt, and Alicia Elliott are rising. Reconciliation may not be a concept robust enough to bring more just relations among treaty people into being, but it has played an important role in provoking public debate—both productive and malicious—that has brought a greater range of voices into the stories we hear….

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…life. But it has also made the prospect of a meaningful exit strategy ever more remote. The old American theology of manifest destiny has swelled to insist that our bases abroad are there by divinely-ordained right. We’re now almost a decade into an Orwellian state of perpetual war-at-a-distance. Yet Bousquet writes that we are still only in the “birth pangs” of the chaoplexic paradigm. God save us from what this baby looks like when it’s born; an…

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

By Peter Laarman

…e him 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 p…

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

By Nicole Greenfield

…vote as much as we are,” he said. “It remains to be seen who’s going to be motivated and mobilized to get out there and do it.” As far as media coverage is concerned, Bakker laments that the same-old anti-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 a…

Who’s to Blame for BP?

By David True

…another irony is that the Act of God theory would help one of the world’s most powerful corporate entities evade its responsibility—morally if not legally. To hide from the bright light of criticism behind the robes of God, if you will, is a cynical use of sacred language and beliefs. Moreover, it is deeply ironic in that we live in a technological age obsessed with control; indeed, it is hard to imagine a more controlling business than that of t…