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How Iowa Became a Stronghold of the Religious Right

By Randall Balmer

…ting hills, its strong progressive tradition, its statewide newspaper, the Des Moines Register, and the sturdy values of its citizens. And no, contrary to the stereotype propagated by those from the coasts who disdain the Midwest as flyover country, Iowa is not flat. Anyone who has ridden RAGBRAI (the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa) knows that the topography of Iowa is definitely not flat. (I’ve done the ride twice, in 1988 and 1…

Iowans for Life Denies Being Behind Anti-Gingrich Flyers

By Sarah Posner

…fraud.” ABC News reported: But outside a historic auditorium in downtown Des Moines where Gingrich promised to support Congressional action to pass a bill that “defines personhood,” critics of the former House Speaker placed pamphlets on car windshield that attacked Gingrich as a “a pro-life fraud.” The pamphlets, which were authorized and paid for by the group, Iowans for Life, accused Gingrich of campaigning for “pro-partial birth abortion can…

Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

…stian faith with National Socialism’s anti-Semitism. The Protestant theologian and Nazi, Walter Grundmann, recognized the problem: Our Volk, which stands in a struggle above all else against the satanic powers of world Jewry for the order and life of this world, dismisses Jesus, because it cannot struggle against the Jews and open its heart to the king of the Jews. What to do? Christian theologians, Catholic and Protestant, reassured Germans that…

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…meone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Similarly, the early Christian community is described in Acts 4:34-35 like this: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.” When rich and powerful people asked how they could be part of this coming Kingdom of God, they were told…

A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…ss of control. Concupiscence describes the culture of shopping. As a Christian theologian Augustine will ultimately argue that ultimate satisfaction is found in God. As he writes in the opening lines of his Confessions, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” We can fool ourselves into thinking that material goods and wealth are the path to happiness, but ultimately Christians argue that true human destiny is the sacred. Oddly, the cult…

Are Evangelical Films Destined to Leave Secular Audiences Behind?

By Daniel Silliman

…‘Hollywoodized’ if it means the same thing to you as it does to me. Christians deserve bigger movies too with great actors, and high production values.” This has been the debate about Left Behind. Among evangelical Christians who like the franchise —which doesn’t include all of them—there are real differences about what the film should be. In this way, Left Behind represents a big question about the persistent problem of the market for faith-and-…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…er of that God—is a testimony (shahadah) whose only realization is existential. For I was taught the shahadah, and I still despaired of God. Just to speak these words, and to mean them, may take all of a lifetime, and it is for this reason that, for Islam to work, God must be both Infinitely Merciful and Endlessly Just. And so we see the journey so many Muslims of our times have taken, from ideologies and identities to the fatal exhaustion and ina…

Corporations Have Consciences and Contraceptives Are Cheap: Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court

By Sarah Posner

…RA). What was most striking, though, was how all three female justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fired the most challenging questions at the companies’ lawyer, Paul Clement, confronting the essential underpinnings of his clients’ claims. In particular, they questioned whether RFRA was intended to cover corporations, whether a party can claim a religious exemption if granting it impacts the rights of others (in this ca…

“Fast for Families” Immigration Reform Effort Enters 20th Day

By Joanna Brooks

…original fasters, Cristian Avila, is a young LDS immigration activist from Phoenix, Arizona. As Cristian grew too weak to continue his fast in public, Sam Adair, a self-described “active” Mormon, father of three and immigration attorney from Austin, Texas, traveled to stand on the mall. RD: How did you come to be fasting for immigration reform on the national mall in Washington, D.C.? SA: My concern about immigration reform started when was 14 or…

Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

By Andrew Aghapour

…ficer Darrell Wilson shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. The media immediately focused on individual blaming, pitting Wilson and Brown against each other with conflicting accounts of each person’s character. As a nation, we were too impatient to follow the crumbs—we wanted to punish the bad person. During the months after Brown’s shooting, attention turned to Ferguson’s social ills—high poverty, low employment, oppressive policing, and…