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Pittsburgh Paradox: A City Haunted by God and Steel

By Ed Simon

…ever, and central to my argument is that Pittsburgh’s archetypal history—a frontier town founded by settler-colonials in a province with utopian aspirations that grows into the wealthiest industrial metropolis in America, only to see its economy gutted by free-market orthodoxy—makes the region a metaphor for the nation itself. Which is what makes the spiritual implications of Pittsburgh’s meaning all the more important, because if we try and recon…

Trump’s ‘Sh*thole Countries’ is Just a Cruder Term for What’s Been Said in American Churches for Generations

By Kathryn Gin Lum

…ad of “heathen” they now use euphemisms like “unreached people groups” or “frontier peoples,” but the underlying worldview of a blessed “us” and a backward “them” remains. The religious outlook on the majority of the world as “heathen” reflects an older mentality—as does usage of the word itself. But just because the concept is older doesn’t mean it’s no longer influential: the idea of the “heathen world” continues to inform white Christian Americ…

Retribution v. Reform in American Justice

By Jennifer Graber

…et (by Robert Orsi) or Rebecca’s Revival (by Jon Sensbach). Orsi’s book is classic because it focused on everyday religious experiences of Italian immigrants, a cluster of activities that many outsider observers considered to be “bad religion.” Orsi did, and still does, find ways to battle that idea. Sensbach uses the story of a formerly enslaved Moravian to give readers a new understanding of how Protestantism came to North America. It’s beautifu…

Introducing the Dr. Who Media Club

By James F. McGrath

…e Gospel According to Science Fiction: From the Twilight Zone to the Final Frontier. He blogs at SF Gospel; *James F. McGrath: Associate professor of religion at Butler University. He blogs at Exploring Our Matrix; *Thomas Bertonneau: Received his Ph.D in comparative literature from UCLA and co-author of The Truth is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction; *Joseph Laycock: RD contributor and a doctoral candidate studying…

It’s Only a Game: How Not to Think about Video Game Violence

By Joanna Brooks

…games and porn—both forms of representation that, critics argue, defy easy classification as First Amendment protected “speech”— Breyer’s dissent raises big questions about the digitally-blurred lines between ideas and actions. These are questions that theologians and faith leaders are only beginning to address, even as the digital plays an ever-more sophisticated and pervasive role in human experience, especially among young people. (Read more ab…

Catholic Bishops End Family Synod With Little To Say To Gays; World Congress of Families Has Plenty To Say, None of it Good; How Same-Sex Marriage Came to a Buddhist Temple in Japan; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…r a request from a Spanish woman who had visited many times for meditation classes. Kawakami looked over the sacred texts of Mahayana Buddhism, and confirmed that such a wedding would not contradict scripture. He expected to be criticized for holding the ceremony, but was also sure that his willingness to hold same-sex wedding ceremonies at the temple would support the LGBT cause by paving the way for more acceptance in Japanese society. “The reas…

What Coverage of a Fatal Orthodox Baptism Reveals About Western Media

By Katherine Kelaidis

Last week a six-week-old baby died in Suceava, Romania during his baptism into the Romanian Orthodox Church. The priest is being held on manslaughter charges and a firestorm of anger has begun to be directed at the Orthodox Church’s practice of full-immersion infant baptism, including a petition urging the Romanian church to change its practice. The Romanian Patriarch has said no such changes will occur. But neither the incident (no matter how tr…

Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

…ohn Crèvecoeur, Abigail Adams’ correspondence, Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” back issues of The Freeman from the 1940s, and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, all the while keeping abreast of Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinions and the latest from University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales? (The book tosses out these references with an air of insouciance, as in “I came across a wonderful book…”) Perhaps Palin herself is,…

For God or for Fame? The Making of a Teenage Bomber

By Kambiz GhaneaBassiri

…ovember 26, Mohamud’s primary connection with Afghanistan or the northwest frontier of Pakistan was media images of Osama bin Laden. As further evidence of his actions being motivated within a media world was the Osama bin Laden-like video he recorded to take credit for the bombing. He changed his clothes for the video and put on a white robe and a white-and-red headdress. He told his FBI handler that, “he wanted to be ‘Sheik Osama style’.” His at…

Web 8.0: The Return of the Human

By Beatrice Marovich

…ees us as a unique species—not like any other animal. He has, for example, reservations about animal rights. Too much empathy for other creatures, he alleges, can lead to “empathy inflation.” If we want to protect the rights of non-humans, we might as well torture ourselves over whether or not we have the right to kill the harmful bacteria that’s crawling around on (and in) us. The borders of the human might be “variegated and fuzzy,” Lanier says,…