By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…re intimately linked in the eyes of those who don’t share either with American capitalism. “Our enemies,” Diane writes, “see what many of us in the knowledge industries overlook—the religious underpinning of American hegemony.” The enemies of empire speak often of the crimes of the past (sometimes, unfortunately, only to obscure their own). Empire, particularly the religiously mediated media empire embraced by The Family, tends to favor the future…
…lical and patriotic basis. Webster made important contributions to an American educational system which kept the nation on a Christian Constitutional course for many years. So, here’s the thing: Maher mocks people for their antiquated beliefs though he never moves beyond an antiquated definition of religion himself. He borrows the same viewpoints of religion that all the way-out interviewees have. He is indignant that people actually believe in an…
…s of hope,’ among them the fact that five million more people received medical care at Community Health Centers (CHC) since 2001.” ++++++++++ Saving the GOP from Itself? Over the next few months, as George W. Bush prepares to leave the White House and return to Texas, conservatives across the land are licking their wounds, wringing their hands and plotting their comeback. A debate about the future of the Republican Party and the role of the religi…
…liberty scholar Jason Hines who asked: “How can we expect a pastor in Africa to care about the rights of homosexuals when the Adventist rhetoric in America is at the very least tinged (and more often saturated) with homophobia and hate?” Indeed, the GC’s statement failed to appreciate that, for many LGBT Adventists, the church’s one-sided disparaging views of homosexuality and same-sex relationships feel like “acts of violence, hatred and discrim…
…o you feel about the cover? Since the book is about the ways in which Americans physically and visually encounter the Ten Commandments, the cover was key to the success, and the integrity, of the enterprise. I had hoped for a graphic design that would signal to the casual reader that what was inside was not what she might expect from a book about these age-old biblical passages: an edgy cover that might feature, say, Keith Haring’s stridently colo…
…aat at the maqam Ibrahim. As I circled around inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door n…
…map as territory. Rather than scrutinize the pollster’s methods, they report their findings as object facts and add their own spin. Readers are left with a map of a map—a caricature, drawn in thick lines on thin paper. Also on The Cubit: A conversation about polling with Robert Wuthnow…
…aims. Wuthnow is right when he suggests, following a report from the American Academy of Political and Social Science, that “money for polls about religion would be better spent on a fewer high-quality polls than on more frequent low-quality polls.” The results won’t be flashier. But the first goal of research, and the goal of journalism, should not be to produce generalizations. It should be, foremost, to chronicle the complexities and weirdness…
…f humankind didn’t awaken him with nuclear weapons. Mothra wouldn’t attack California if greedy capitalists didn’t kidnap his miniature priestesses. The monsters symbolically destroy our human world, and we cheer because we think it’s all our fault. We deserve it, this says—a theology of sin and divine retribution. The kaiju-as-divine-wrath theme is nowhere as clear as in Gamera 3: Awakening of Irys, possibly the genre’s best film since the origin…
…picture of an innocent young woman, but for taunting her based on her physical appearance—a physical appearance that, in her mind (the only one that matters) is divinely inspired. Of course the woman’s appearance only seems odd to some because of our own culturally mutated and narrow-minded gender norms. The virtual conflict became very real when the anonymous woman got a name—Belprett Kaur—and logged on to Reddit to comment herself. Kaur’s respon…
