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Jesus Said Punch Up, Not Down: Why William Barber’s Attack on the Religious Right May Not Be What It Seems

By Daniel Schultz

…ith—that government programs are an ineffective means of poverty relief at best, and at worst, a counter-productive or even predatory response to the poor. When I say “an article of faith” here, I am not being critical: there are many American Christians who believe that taxes are theft, government hurts more than it helps, and that the right way to address poverty is through religious charity only, not public policy. People like Rev. Barber and I…

Does Donald Trump Have a Catholic Problem?

By Patricia Miller

…less educated white voters in the South, Appalachia (West Virginia is his best state) and the Northeast. Catholics are sparse in the first two regions, but heavy in the last, which includes some of the country’s most Catholic states: Rhode Island, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. To date Trump is holding up well in these states, especially his home state of New York. But a surging Marco Rubio, a Catholic who is now edging int…

Forgiving LeBron, Fetal Jesus Sonogram, and Hummus Wars

By Michael J. Altman

The best part of Christmas is the advertising. I don’t mean the Coca Cola commercials with Santa and polar bears. I mean stuff like a sonogram of fetal Jesus complete with halo and a tag line reminding us “He’s on His way.” I also always enjoy a good Christmas billboard duel. This season do we celebrate Reason or Jesus? And are those are only choices? Maybe we should settle on the friendlier “Reason’s Greetings.” The only thing I like as much as…

Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…,” It’s a Wonderful Life combines political radicalism and existential despair into a strangely harmonious whole. Smarmy angel Kevin Smith’s 1999 fantasy comedy Dogma generated howls of protest from those who felt that the film was generally impious and specifically anti-Catholic, despite the fact that its director was a graduate of New Jersey parochial schools (or maybe because of it). Real life Hollywood best friends Ben Affleck and Matt Damon…

The Most Important Religious Category of the Primaries, the Non-Religious, Doesn’t Break Down as Cleanly as You Think

By Daniel Schultz

…t of the 30-to-44s. … Biden would struggle to turn these groups out in the best of circumstances, but they’re also the most likely to be bummed out into non-participation by a Sanders loss. Biden is flatly opposed to many of the initiatives, like free public college and canceling student-loan debt and Medicare For All, that attract young people to Sanders. We might say very much the same thing about non-religious voters. Biden seems to be in littl…

It’s the Water! And Other Lowlights from Presidential Science Debate

By Michael Schulson

…ed concrete policy recommendations, too. It’s better to have policy than flair (perhaps), but it was striking that the candidate left out the entire moral dimension of climate change—for example, that a warming world will disproportionately affect the poor, even as it was disproportionately caused by the rich; and that millions may die or be displaced. Or, for that matter, that each and every one of the problems outlined in Trump’s response is dee…

Conventional Wisdom: RNC/DNC Giving God a Bad Name?

By Peter Laarman

…ou don’t miss the water till the well runs dry. No amount of posturing, no airbrushing over the reality of an atomized society, can change this. I’m not counseling despair here. I think our stores of positive social capital can be replenished. If nothing else, the climate crisis will soon cause us to re-think our devotion to the unofficial American religion of acquisitive individualism. So will the frustration of our best and brightest young peop…

We May Be Sacrificing Our Children to the God of the Gun — But it’s Not That the God Requires the Deaths

By Stephanie Frank

…ur Moloch,” written just after the Newtown murders nearly a decade ago, is best understood. He wrote, That horror [of the Sandy Hook shootings] cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. Th…

Václav Havel: Democracy as Spiritual Discipline

By Peter Montgomery

…to begin, where or how to find meaningful outlets. In such a state of affairs, politicians have a duty to awaken this slumbering potential, to offer it direction and ease its passage, to encourage it and give it room, or simply hope. They say a nation gets the politicians it deserves. […] At the same time – paradoxically – the opposite is also true; society is a mirror of its politicians. It is largely up to the politicians which social forces t…

Do We Owe Human Rights to the Christian Right?

By Austin Dacey

…and 1940s work of French Catholic personalist intellectuals and on the spread of “human dignity” in Western European constitutions, beginning with the 1937 Christian Democratic constitution of Ireland, Moyn concludes that “through this lost and misremembered transwar era, it is best to see human rights as a project of the Christian right for the most part, not the secular left.” Is the advancement of human rights in the 1940s best seen as a proje…