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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…

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…

The Visceral Vote: Obama-as-Sojourner v. McCain-as-Mythic-Hero

By Ira Chernus

…ters ask “Which candidate has values most like yours?” or “Which candidate best understands and cares about your needs?”, Obama consistently comes out ahead. The McCain campaign’s strenuous effort to make the biracial son of a single mom from Kansas a symbol of “elitism” isn’t working very well. What is working is McCain’s focus on “experience” and on the realm of war, the military, and national security. That’s the one area where McCain consisten…

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…

Gay Mormons Tie the Knot

By Johnny Townsend

…yman, about a gay Mormon missionary in Italy, was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2011, and my latest, Marginal Mormons, just received a starred review from Kirkus.) I also marched with the Mormons for Marriage Equality contingent this year in Seattle’s Gay Pride parade, amazed to see compassionate Mormons with signs proclaiming “Sorry we’re late!” I belong to Affirmation, an organization for LGBTQ Mormons. I still have my triple combination on a…

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…