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Good Hair, Good God! The Divine Politics of African-American Hair

By Anthea Butler

…o write my book, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World, I had to wear my hair bone-straight in order for many of the women in the denomination to accept me. Had I come with the 1970s retro hairstyle I rock today, I doubt seriously if the book would have been finished. Hair acted as a marker in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) from the very beginnings of the denomination: their holiness and purity codes in the early 20t…

Cloverfield: Sin & Redemption, with Monsters

By Gabriel Mckee

…ore literal sense. Mothra and Varan the Unbelievable are both worshiped by rural villagers, and when modern, urban society intrudes on their turf, they take revenge. Kaiju films take a certain pleasure in unleashing this destruction, and lurking at the dark heart of that pleasure is a sense that, somehow, we deserve it. The kaiju bring punishment; the human drama explains the sin. Godzilla wouldn’t attack Tokyo if humankind didn’t awaken him with…

McCain’s Prosperity Preacher

By Sarah Posner

…r of positive thinking, and attainable middle class prosperity of the post-World War II era, the Word of Faith movement took hold in the 1950s followed by a doctrinal merger with televangelist Oral Roberts’ seed-faith theology in the 1960s. With the explosion of religious broadcasting in the 1970s, the result today is seen not only in the preaching of Hagee and Parsley, but also in most of the country’s leading televangelists and their imitators,…

Battlestar Galactica and the Future of American Religion

By Nick Street

…turing her human captive, Gaius Baltar, for information about the deadly virus. Baltar, who knows nothing about the virus but despairs of shaking D’Anna’s conviction that he does, decides instead to probe the chink he perceives in the monotheistic faith that his tormentor uses to justify her actions. “You can’t help asking yourself how God can allow death and destruction and then you despise yourself for asking,” he says. “The truth is if we knew…

Hagee Hangs On

By Bill Berkowitz

…lson told Religion Dispatches. “Tens of millions of Americans have seen my video on TV and read Hagee’s statements in newspapers, and the media treatment of Hagee’s statements has not been, for the most part, very favorable.” “The volatile views of Hagee and some other leading Christian Zionists have been an elephant on the table of American politics for decades,” Fred Clarkson, the co-founder of Talk2Action told RD. “Many books and articles have…

The Theodicy of George Carlin

By Kathryn Lofton

…’t give a shit.” After all, look at the results: “war, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades.” “This is not good work,” he appraised, “Results like these do not belong on the resumé of a Supreme Being.” Carlin needed a God, wanted a God (“When it comes to believing in God, I tried… I really tried.”), but couldn’t release himself from some rudimentary requirements of such a God. Disappo…

“I’d Be Stupid Not To Go Packing Now.”

By Rev. Irene Monroe

…dden urban areas riddled with drug and gang warfares, as I do, this recent ruling brings a heightened concern about personal safety. But this ruling also heightens concerns about personal safety for those of us who rely on hate crimes laws to protect us from the bigoted actions of our fellow citizens. “I can see some crazed fool come into a bar where gays hang out or my homeys and shoot the hell out of us,” Adam Williams told me. Williams is an Af…

Rebuilding the Wall of Separation: A Progressive Discussion on Church & State

By Bruce Ledewitz

…do that, even if solely from among other religious believers. Theocracy is rule by clerics. Democracy is rule by majority. Democracy does not depend upon a secular motivation. Incidentally, Frederick’s defense of President Obama’s call to believers to translate their religious concerns into nonreligious language lends support to my original Constitutional proposal. I called for government and nonbelievers to perform this same operation of translat…

The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

By Frederick Clarkson

…lity into a “godly” spiritual realm, in which lies the “perfect,” and a corrupt material world, which is “profanity, unconsciousness and death.” Second, there’s “conspiratorialism” or “the psychologizing of historical events to the conscious intentions and omniscient and all-powerful Benefactors and Malefactors.” This mix reduces the causes of perceived social decline into a quest for scapegoats in need of elimination. And third, there’s the apoca…

Reverend Billy For Mayor: Is He For Real?

By Nathan Schneider

…to ape religious faith for political ends. And he’s not the first actor to run for high office in this country—though Ronald Reagan left his costumes in Hollywood. Running against Republican/Independent Mike Bloomberg and his daunting lead in the polls, even Democrat Bill Thompson’s campaign seems little more than symbolic. Having fallen short of both the fundraising and polling quotas, election rules didn’t allow Talen to participate in the first…