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Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…s purely sexual beings. Foster’s screed is simply a long promo for a new ex-gay movie coming out, and the trailer, three-minutes of nauseating footage, centers around how each of these former homosexuals lived their lives in clubs, engaging in cheap, easy, and often public sex, or were sexually abused. For all the claptrap the religious right yells about how they don’t want to think of us “that way,” the trailer for the film is positively voyeuris…

Springtime for Ross Douthat?

By Daniel Schultz

…uralist”— as though its message of redemption and liberation of the African-American community has nothing to do with it. And then there’s the bit about “religious liberalism’s urge to follow secular liberalism in embracing the sexual revolution and all its works.” Cute. I wonder if a Times columnist might not want to consider the use of statistics in his work, like this one: 99% of all American women who have had sex have used some form of birth…

The Moral Bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Asceticism

By Vlad Chituc

…nehart claims to have spent $1,450 on a rig that leaves him completely self-sufficient. But Rhinehart isn’t self-sufficient in the same way Thoreau was. Thoreau planted his own food, made his own clothes, and built his own house. Rhinehart outsources. He doesn’t have a car because he takes Uber. He doesn’t go grocery shopping because he buys his “staple food online like a civilized person.” He doesn’t go to the liquor store, because a company call…

Doubt v. Predator: A Vatican II Parable

By Gabriel Mckee

…r children from harm—justify her means. On the surface Doubt is a torn-from-the-headlines story about the abuse scandals that have rocked the Church over the last decade. At its heart, however, Shanley’s story is a parable of Vatican II. It’s critical here to point out that Doubt is set in 1964, in the midst of the Second Vatican Council; in that context the story reflects the Church’s growing pains. Sister Aloysius is the old church, authoritaria…

Recovering From Rejection: The Second Coming of Ted Haggard

By Wendy Norris

…startlingly provocative description of his former compatriots as authority- and rules-fixated Pharisees—a notion that also reinforces his own disquieting personal portrayal of himself as a modern-day apostle, a notion no doubt borrowed in part from New Apostolic teachings. From Master of the Universe to Castaway While the fundamentalist helm comes unglued over the prospect of a new Haggard ministry (and a new book deal he’s currently negotiating)…

Why Taxing the Rich is the Godly Thing

By Peter Laarman

…e little problem with this scenario: Obama has surrounded himself with once-and-future high-income individuals who are themselves highly susceptible to supply-side dogma that says the rich must be curtsied to and coddled if the nation is to prosper. We should note that this is how savage inequality maintains its vampirish lease on American life: by replicating itself within the bloodstream of elites and would-be elites. But the full weight of re…

SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

By Michael Schulson

…tationary biking class—a.k.a. spinning—into a fashionable, upper-crust, New-Agey-communal experience. SoulCycle classes involve candles, loud music, in-sync cycling, and exhortative therapy-speak from instructors, many of whom sideline as models. The spiritual dimensions are sometimes explicit—note the “Soul” and the dharmachakra-esque logo. The phenomenon has been described as a church, a cult, and, more cholerically, as “the most mindless versio…

Islam in Conflict with Democracy? A Response to Stanley Fish

By David True

…conducted peacefully, openly, and with the intent of making our democracy stronger. Our constitutional democracy is not only capable of respecting conscience but of welcoming it into an ongoing conversation about what it means to be an American. American Muslims are just that, American and Muslim, and as both they are well positioned—perhaps uniquely so—to make significant contributions to our democratic society and to the global debate about the…

Electability of Biden is More ‘Conventional’—and Less ‘Wisdom’

By Branko Marcetic

…turnout dropping sharply after twenty years of steady rises. As one African-American non-voter told the New York Times: “Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway.” Not only does opposing Trump with another unexciting, supposedly electable, establishment-friendly centrist like Biden mean repeating an experiment that’s already failed disastrously; it means running a candidate who has all of Clinton’s weaknesses and more. Unli…

Hobby Lobby: Key to a More Liberal and Less Religious America?

By Rebecca Sager

…ligion into public spaces will actually cause Americans—especially younger Americans—to move even further away from organized religion than they have already. By pushing religion into the public sphere, the religious and political right is unintentionally pushing religion out of people’s private hearts and minds, and moving people out of the pews across America. The number of nones (people with no religious preference) is on the rise, with over 20…