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Betraying a Sacred Trust: From Penn State to Dover Air Force Base

By Gary Laderman

…ndal concerning sexual violence inflicted on young boys and the disturbing news from Dover Air Force base about the treatment of soldiers’ corpses are equally difficult to fathom but both tragically clear signs of corruption in the body politic. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the line “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark” is uttered to signal the growing awareness that Denmark’s morality is in decline and crime is rotting the state from th…

God, “The 34th Miner” in Chilean Ordeal

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…istresses and one newborn; the personal lives of these men exposed for the world’s scrutiny. Through the scandals, the drilling, and the anticipation, we heard repeatedly about faith—the faith that accompanied these men for over two months. Mario Sepulveda claims that he witnessed the fight between good and evil in the shadowy darkness 2,300 feet below the earth’s surface, and in the end God won. It was his faith in God that assured him of his res…

A Love Letter to #Exvangelicals and Those Deconstructing Their Toxic Faith

By Andrew L. Seidel

…world is constructed—beliefs that they have been told were unequivocally true, by their most trusted sources, since they were little—beliefs that have been deliberately and systematically ingrained. The reverse of indoctrination, the process of systematically pulling apart those beliefs is sometimes called “deconstructing.” And deconstructing is having something of a media moment. This gives me hope for our species because it shows that humans ar…

Walt Whitman’s Sacred Democracy

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…response below—particularly apt this week, as violence leads the national news—Louis Ruprecht invites us to reflect on Walt Whitman’s singular vision of the democratic undertaking. –The Eds.] By reminding us of a number of the most curious headline-stories spanning the previous twelve months, RD’s “2010: What Did We Believe In?” invites a range of emotional responses. My own reactions tended to the extremes: extreme worry at some of the crass and…

Evangelical Fiction Helped Shape a Culture of Faith — Along with Suspicion, Fear, and Resentment

By Christopher Douglas

…. Like all other human groups, evangelicals circulate knowledge by telling stories—and their stories don’t only come from the Bible, but also from popular fiction. Literary critics generally shy away from the evangelical fiction that’s been published since the 1970s, partly because we English professors regard it as too popular; it lacks artistry and its generally conservative theology is, I think, embarrassing to some scholars of faith. Fortunate…

Taking the Christ Back Out of Christmas: Secularizing the Season

By C. Joshua Villines

…rd of a baby born in a stable. In fact, the most familiar and heartwarming stories we associate with this time of year often have little or no theological component to them. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (which almost singlehandedly brought about the modern observance of the holiday) has nothing to do with Jesus; Scrooge isn’t redeemed by the Gospel, but by the realization that his greed has cost him more than he could ever measure in gold. Likewise,…

Cloverfield: Sin & Redemption, with Monsters

By Gabriel Mckee

…while Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem took a cynical glee in the symbolic destruction of middle America. All of these stories fit into previously established subgenres well-suited to apocalyptic themes, but Cloverfield is the first to venture into the most apocalyptic of them all: the giant monster genre. Cloverfield owes much to Japanese giant monster films, or kaiju eiga. The monsters of these films are wrathful gods, either figuratively or literal…

Joe the Plumber: Horatio Alger with Plumber’s Crack

By Jonathan L. Walton

…e. Such facts are irrelevant in the minds of those who need to believe the stories we tell ourselves. A modern day Horatio Alger with plumber’s crack is much more appealing than the reality of a depreciating house, evaporating 401K, and dwindling American job market. Unfortunately, regardless of the characters and costumes that the McCain/Palin ticket parade this week, these are the real stories of our lives that we must eventually confront. Trick…

Not Peace, But Division? Evangelical Vaccine Refusers Divide Families

By Chrissy Stroop

…nt characteristic of authoritarian communities is their embrace of a post-truth ethos, which renders “truth” a matter of in-group loyalty and power politics, as opposed to a matter of facts and evidence. Authoritarians are typically dismissive of legitimate experts, and evangelicals are no exception in this regard. Indeed, evangelicals have been busy building their own parallel institutional and information infrastructure since the 1960s, when Chr…

Men Without Guns: A Tribute to Larry McMurtry

By Amy Laura Hall

…the West and paid men to lay down barbed wire are not in these books. The stories go on as men and women are cruel, indifferent, and sometimes tender with one another underneath that larger cruelty. Diana Ossana, McMurtry’s long writing partner, insisted he read Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” after it first appeared in The New Yorker in 1997. Together they brought the story to the big screen, vivifying Proulx’s wind-scoured, skeletal prose w…