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Ebola and Us: The American Roots of Liberia’s Trauma

By Peter Laarman

…ion had few misgivings about the rightness of chattel slavery. Their ranks numbered legendary compromiser Henry Clay of Kentucky and planter-statesmen John Randolph and Richard Bland Lee of Virginia. Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, was so named in 1824 to honor another slavery-supporting Southerner who happened to occupy the White House at the time: President James Monroe. And while some early proponents of colonization, like William Lloyd Garrison,…

Santorum’s War on Satan… er, on Higher Education

By Eric Reitan

…nd if we’re going to compete in the world market, we both have to have the best equipment and the best training. But Santorum doesn’t care about the facts, because attacking Obama on higher education is really just a pretext for pushing what is, for him, a more urgent message—namely that higher education should be viewed as a problem, not an opportunity. Although he currently frames this message in the Tea Party language of “liberal professors” an…

King as Inspiration, Not Guide

By William D. Hart

…ou and me, he was buffeted by circumstances he did not choose. He made the best choices that he could (most of the time) given the circumstances, acting the way everyone acts: from compulsion, from character and disposition, from habits that had been cultivated over a lifetime. The reasons came later, after the fact, when the heat of the moment had passed, and in calm repose he could reflect and give an account, retrospectively, of why he did what…

How We Got to Super: Grant Morrison’s Visionary Gnosticism

By Jeffrey J. Kripal

…s here involve those in a Kathmandu hotel room just after the writer had visited a Tantric Buddhist temple. As Morrison chills on the roof of the Vajra Hotel, he sees the temple come alive and begin to rear up like one of those living sports cars in the Transformers movies. He retreats to his room, only to find chrome-like presences emerging from the walls and furniture. Their liquid mercurial forms challenge even the writer’s way with words: they…

Satanists Want You to Respond to the Pandemic with Compassion. And Reason.

By Joseph Laycock

…the pandemic? Definitely the Fifth Tenet: Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs. We have to defer to scientists on this, especially the projection models of epidemiologists. We also have to reject conspiracy theories, including blaming the current crisis on the Obama administration. Any others? As we become frustrated over the respons…

A Boundary-Busting Memoir of Love, Mental Illness, and Being Muslim in America

By Haroon Moghul

…your next book? I’m working on three novels, a proper trilogy, that I can best describe as a cross between science fiction, Bollywood, and alternative history. The first, Americans, takes place in the 21st and 17th centuries, and tells the story of two best friends who get stranded outside each other’s timelines and try to find their way back, even as each move they make changes the world the other one lives in. It basically asks what happens if…

Raising Children the Right Way

By Jeffrey Feldman

…bad behavior, but an opportunity to express love. According to Dobson, the best chance to communicate comes after an episode where the parent has physically hurt the child: For this reason, parents should not dread or shrink back from confrontations with their children. These occasions should be anticipated as important events, because they provide the opportunity to convey verbal and nonverbal messages to the boy or girl that cannot be expressed…

A Long History of Blaming the Jews

By Gordon Haber

…lly to a logic that treated the relative ‘Jewishness’ of a teaching as the best test of its truth or falsity.” Marcion, Tertullian, Justin, Origen and Jerome differed on crucial Christological and scriptural questions; still most identified any hint of carnality as “Jewish” and accused their opponents of “Judaizing.” Augustine took the trope even further, arguing in Against Faustus that the Jews were the living exemplar of falsity, “proof to belie…

A Recent Local Controversy Reveals the Theocratic Heart of ‘Project Blitz’

By Frederick Clarkson

…enerally referred to as a Christian nationalist, largely because he is the best-known promoter of the idea. But as a former vice chair of the Texas Republican Party and a frequent headliner at Christian right and Republican conclaves, he is also a Dominionist with considerable political reach. (The Jefferson Lies was on the New York Times best-seller list at the time it was withdrawn.) The Christian nationalist appeal is to, what historian Frank L…

Halloween, Evangelicals, and the Macabre

By John W. Morehead

…ism must be evil is ignored; as is that fact that Halloween incorporates a number of elements and influences that have accrued during its journey through various cultures. In truth, some of these elements are Christian, like the feast of the dead that attempted to maintain communion with the saints, both living and deceased. The Roman Catholic Church continues to include this element in its festivities, and thus, as historian Ronald Hutton argues…