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Open Carry Racism: The Right Wing Fever Dream that Predates Trump

By Jason C. Bivins

…and efficient as much as they wanted somebody who looked at the world the way they do. And as Facebook Likes became Tweets became Instagram posts, we came to care more energetically about participating through our clicks in Life as Action Movie than in collective action, about announcing our outrage than in finding ways out of it. Trump is in no small part the product of this combination of vanity and imagination. He will fight for us, we hear. H…

Election Reporters: Here’s Why Simply Descriptors Like ‘Christians’ Can Have Enormous Consequences

By Daniel Schultz

…For a lot of reasons, conservative Christians tend to own the cultural megaphone today. (Most important among them: conservative judges endorsing extremist conservative Christian arguments.) So I don’t expect the average person to understand all the nuances. But journalists covering national politics, especially those on the Trump beat, need to do better. Here’s why. First of all, it’s a matter of accuracy. As Sarah Posner points out on Bluesky, t…

Take the Van Gogh Challenge: Doctor Who Part VII

By Gabriel Mckee

…e Doctor and… what? Time? The universe? Fate? Chaos? God? The Doctor has always been a rebel—he always pushes the “protest” button. Most of the time that rebelliousness works out for the best, and he becomes (as I described him earlier this season) an anarchist messiah. But when his attempts at salvation fail, the innocent can suffer. There was one thing about this episode that made me a bit uncomfortable. “Vincent and the Doctor” fictionalizes th…

The Meaning of Make Believe (Why Religion Doesn’t Have to Be “Real”)

By Neil Ellingson

…with a late-night walk through the woods behind my parents’ house, and the best way I’ve found to describe that inaugural experience was that the trees looked “more real than before.” When I tried to explain this—and the sense that everything felt more real, including my self—to my college girlfriend, she looked at me with the same scrunched, doubting brow my friends had on that canoe trip years before. And then a strange thing happened. After som…

The Roots of the American Right’s Muslim Brotherhood Panic

By Sarah Posner

…tone has mostly been nationalist and secular. But that reality gets in the way of some good propaganda for the American right, namely that the Muslim Brotherhood is the architect of the right’s imagined Islamic plot to replace the Constitution with shari’ah law. A propagandist like Frank Gaffney finds many opportunities to peddle this claim. He — and others, including the authors of the laughable book Muslim Mafia, which claimed that the Council…

David Brat: Catholic, Calvinist, and Libertarian, Oh My!

By Julie Ingersoll

…model, is severely restrained in its authority over economic activity. The best check on the depravity of individuals who make up the civil government is the decentralization of authority into the distinct spheres; the best check on the depravity of human beings in the economy is the decentralization of the market created by competition. Historian Michael McVicar has this called this “theocratic libertarianism”: it creates an economic zone free of…

Falling in Love With the Earth: Francis’ Faithful Ecology

By Jacob J. Erickson

…intrinsic part of an ecological conversion to the earth. (Think of it this way: by my count the word “ecology” occurs thirty-three times in the encyclical. The word “beauty” occurs twenty-seven times). Another point of connection is the theme of integral ecology. In a nod to liberation theology and Leonardo Boff in particular it seems, Laudato si refuses to make the choice between human and ecological life a zero-sum game. Pope Francis writes, Tod…

Repent, Hillary: Trump’s Evangelical Backers Play the Sin Card

By Hollis Phelps

…er told us how to vote, he gave us all the good common sense to choose the best leaders.” It’s important to emphasize that best doesn’t mean perfect, as Abraham, Moses, and David would remind us. The assumption of God’s providence, however, doesn’t work both ways—that is, it can’t be positively applied to Trump’s presumed opponent, Hillary Clinton. That may seem inconsistent, at least on the surface: if God chooses imperfect people, then can’t God…

No, THIS is the Real Christianity…

By Ira Chernus

…Tyson. But ultimately, this could be a deadly punch. If earth were in the way, the article tells us, it would be “decomposed.” Fortunately, the AP assures us, Earth is not in the way. Whew! The article ends with a physicist pronouncing “two main lessons to be learned from what the telescopes have found: This is a reminder that you are not alone in the universe. You are not isolated. You are not an island.” And “avoid black holes when you can.” Oh…

Aliens, Nanobots, & Microbes: The Science of Secular Apocalypse

By Michael Schulson

…o had kids. A lot of them are very open to debate. And so we went out on a number of occasions and had two or three drinks and talked about the ethics of having a kid. There are legitimate questions to be asked, just at an existential level, about whether it’s right to bring something into the world that will suffer—and also experience pleasure—but will suffer and eventually perish. Let’s imagine the best world we can imagine. Is it right to bring…