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Dems’ “Great Satan” Strategy Falls Apart Right From Start

By Peter Laarman

…d up a nice boost among progressives from the lengthy cover article in the New York Times Magazine, a good piece of reporting by Gideon Lewis-Krauss suggesting that HRC was absorbing into her rhetoric and into her forward planning some serious critique of the corporate state from the Roosevelt Institute and from the likes of Joe Stiglitz: a critique that cuts far deeper than Bernie’s and that is linked to very specific policy proposals. So yes, sh…

Overture To Catholics, From an Episcopal Priest

By Randall Balmer

…, just five months later, the tables have turned. Every new edition of the New York Times, it seems, carries fresh disclosures about priestly pedophilia in Ireland, Germany, and (most appallingly) at a Catholic school for the deaf in Wisconsin. Sadly enough, priestly pedophilia is old news by now. What’s new, in the opening of court documents that the Vatican sought desperately to suppress, is that the Catholic hierarchy stubbornly refused to deal…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…hollow with the daily revelations of sexual abuse cases—most recently the New York Times’ exposé on the deaf children abused by Father Murphy in Wisconsin. The exponential spread of documents and stories surrounding clerical sexual abuse, from Wisconsin to Munich, has put the Vatican in a defensive posture against the media, circling the flaming wagons around its impervious leader. Making matters worse, the Pope tried to deflect from the mounting…

Nostalgia Voters? Not Really. Trump and His Supporters Value This More Than the Past

By Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead

…on” called the “1776 Commission.” This initiative would help develop a “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history.” “Our nation’s great history.” That statement might sound ironic coming from a President and supporters who have passionately resisted calls to remove Confederate statues and monuments (see below)―evidence that our nation’s history is, in fact, not so great. But that’s actually the point. Sourc…

HitchBot Meets His Maker: What a Robot’s Murder Tells Us About Ourselves

By Michael Schulson

…time that it’s sometimes nicer to talk to a non-human entity, whom we sort-of-imagine is able to comprehend language. There’s an analogy here, too, with religion. A believer might assume an intimacy with a god she can neither see nor hear, and whose essential nature she is unable to probe. You need not be an atheist to consider the anthropologically-inflected perspective that believers project their ideas, desires, and expectations onto their obj…

May GOP Save Us From Chaos: Mircea Eliade on Election 2010

By Ira Chernus

…But apparently they aren’t finding it. At least that’s what I read in the New York Times. They’ve got a political analyst named Matt Bai who really understands these deeper motives. Listen to what he’s written lately: “Voters in a lot of the country trusted in an established order that seemed to be working pretty well for them, but then people saw their cities and their industries collapse… With global interdependence comes a certain lack of cont…

The Democrats’ Real Religion Problem, And All Of Ours

By Daniel Schultz

…tian background may have hurt him in the South; he did poorly among African-American voters, despite his consistent civil rights record. But he did what few other secular candidates have done: He won a sympathetic hearing from conservative evangelicals with a speech that gave a religious grounding for his economic views, complete with biblical citations. When Mr. Sanders spoke at Liberty University, he did not pretend to share evangelical Christia…

With Creation of Little Noticed Department, Pope Francis is Securing Liberal Reforms

By Cormac Shine

…r taste of the austere Benedict XVI’s difficult pontificate. An insightful New York Times article in November highlighted how easily Pope Francis’s gains could be reversed, detailing the race against time he faces to ensure that his vision for the Church survives his death or resignation, by appointing enough liberal cardinals to elect a successor with priorities close to his own. Seventy-seven of the 121 cardinals currently eligible to vote in th…

Never Mind the Libertarians, Here’s the ‘Pragmatist Moment’

By Eric C. Miller

…deportations and by expanding Bush’s N.S.A. surveillance program. As one 30-year-old libertarian senior staff member on the Hill told me: “I think we expected this sort of thing from Bush. But Obama seemed to be hip and in touch with my generation, and then he goes and reads our emails. Chait disputes the facts and figures very persuasively. But Draper could be right on the data and still be wrong in how he interprets it. It’s true that the millen…

David Barton: Falling from Grace?

By Paul Harvey

…efferson Lies, leaving little but pulp at the bottom of their scholarly veg-o-matic. Thomas Nelson, publisher of David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies and a substantial catalog of Christian works (some serious and respectable, some amusingly kitschy such as The Patriot’s Bible, an “extremely unique Bible” that illustrates biblical verses with inspiring scenes from American history), finally has had enough. On Thursday, the publisher announced that it …