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The Key to Understanding the Federalist Society Isn’t Originalism — It’s This 800-Year Old Tradition

By Peter Schwartz

…hich Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. With no feudal past to constrain us, with Protestantism and the Enlightenment the beginning of our history, we’re often blind to political and legal activity within our own nation that doesn’t conform to liberal democratic precepts. Like the android host Dolores in the first season of Westworld, when presented by her father with a photo of a smiling woman in an alien urban landscape, we als…

“The Gift of Gay”: Father Matthew Kelty, Confessor to Thomas Merton, Dies at 96

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ned that Father Matthew Kelty left this world peacefully at noon on Friday last. This is a great loss to those of us newly, and not-so-newly, arrived, and I wanted to try to explain why I think this is so. This remarkable monk spent fifty off-and-on years at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where he was the last confessor that Thomas Merton ever had; and if that wasn’t enough to warrant further discussion, he was also a gay priest who came out…

Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

…,” a hatred of Jews that they call racial and blame on anti-Christian atheists. Historians have made it clear that the distinction is not legitimate, and logic compels recognition that from a Jewish perspective it doesn’t matter if the SS officer who killed my grandmother attended Catholic mass the next Sunday or mocked Jesus as a wimpy, pathetic Jew. What does matter is that the Church (Protestant as well as Catholic) never excommunicated that SS…

Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

By Andrew Aghapour

…with Rothstein on the phone, he underscored the long-term effects of this last policy. During the 1940s and 1950s, suburban subdivisions were built in St. Louis, and throughout the country, using federal loans stipulating that no homes be sold to African Americans. Priced at about $125,000 in today’s dollars, these were affordable—with a mortgage—to working class families, black or white. Yet black families were prohibited from purchasing them. “…

Does Atheism Have a Misogyny Problem?

By Julia Galef

…ad into The Amazing Meeting, a 1,600-strong skeptic and atheist conference last month, you might be excused for assuming that the giant elephant in the room had escaped from some circus on the Strip. But you’d be wrong. That elephant in the room with us was our own. There’s no pachyderm in Vegas—or on Earth—that big, or that ugly. This elephant was born in July, when a well-known skeptic blogger named Rebecca Watson, who maintains the “Skepchick”…

Violence of the Lambs: The Legacy of Anti-Choice Extremist Father Norman Weslin

By Kathryn Joyce

…as a veteran of some of the most highly-publicized clinic blockades of the last 20 years, having been arrested between 70 and 80 times, mostly for entering or barricading abortion providers’ offices. A former Green Beret and paratrooper, and an army specialist who had been in control of nuclear defense systems for New York City, Weslin became a priest in 1986, six years after the death of his wife Mary, for whom he created a namesake series of hom…

Hagee Calls Obama “The Most Anti-Semitic President Ever”

By Sarah Posner

…n six years since Foxman has remarked on the CUFI leader’s statements. The last time was in 2008, after a 1999 sermon surfaced in which Hagee characterized the Holocaust as part of God’s plan for the Jews. At the time, Foxman corresponded with Hagee, and later issued a statement welcoming Hagee’s letter “clarifying his views” and “his acknowledgement that the Holocaust was a tragedy unique in its evil and horror and the limits of our understanding…

Praise the Lard This Holiday Season

By Becky Garrison

…as,” the United Church of Bacon (UCB) placed a holiday themed billboard in Las Vegas, Nevada featuring two strips of bacon hiteheadearing a Santa hat and a Star of David respectively. This billboard’s slogan reads “Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah from the 13,000 Atheists and Skeptics at the United Church of Bacon,” replete with the tagline, “Bacon is our God because bacon is real.” Since its inception during a meeting at Penn Jillette’s house i…

LDS Church Launches New Website Calling for Greater Openness and Understanding on LGBT Issues

By Joanna Brooks

…m his home in East Helena, Montana, to a predominantly Mormon community in Las Vegas, Nevada, so that he could be surrounded by LDS people. He served in the Church, attended LDS temple services, worked for a Church-owned bookstore, got engaged to a woman, and prayed earnestly that he’d feel the same kind of attraction to her as he did to men. “But one day in the temple,” Cox says, “I got the impression I was asking for the wrong thing: that I shou…

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…not from a position of power and privilege, but from the cross, among the last and the least. This is good news that speaks hope to people hanging on lynching trees, strapped to torture tables, or beaten and abused in their own homes. Beginning from the bottom, it includes everyone. A “gospel” that speaks only to “conquerors”—like, say, Beck’s version—leaves out most of humanity. Some may object that black theology, by its very name, leaves out w…