Why The Advocate‘s Choice of Pope Francis for Person of the Year is a Mistake
…Pope Francis as much as anyone, I need concrete actions to back up the sentiments. Until the dogma changes, talk is cheap….
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Why Egypt is America’s Enemy
…llow Arabs, demonized and derided for years, such that their blood becomes cheap. This happens all too often with minorities; what is unique about the Arab world is the degree to which many dictatorships also oppress the majority. My point in that essay about Tunisia was that we in America and the West generally reflexively associate secularism with what is good and democratic, and conservatism (specifically, in Islam) with that which is antidemo…
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The Moral Bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Asceticism
…is unethical, I wonder how he imagines those clothes in China are made so cheaply, and whether an industrial factory qualifies as a gauntlet. If Rhinehart washed his clothes himself, however, he would need a washing machine, which takes energy, and he couldn’t say he lived on a battery anymore. A commenter on Rhinehart’s post aptly called this brand of asceticism “consumption laundering”; because Rinehart doesn’t do the consumption himself, it do…
Read MoreHater Pastor Loses His Wife of 42 Years, Uses the Occasion to Trash Gays
…dy and that is morally wrong.” But, using your wife’s death to score a few cheap political points against a group of people you hate isn’t “morally wrong”? But wait, there’s more! Garlow also uses his dead wife to point out just how fake the relationships between living, loving gay and lesbian partners really are. He talks about the delight he experienced being married to his wife, something gay and lesbian people certainly couldn’t have, right?…
Read MoreWatching Preachers’ Daughters Right After the Boston Bombings While Teaching a Class on Augustine’s Confessions
…the reductive “purity” rhetoric with something reductive of my own, like a cheap criticism that Christianity is anti-sex and anti-body. Which brings me to Augustine’s Confessions, and specifically, reading Augustine’s Confessions with my Intro Theology class this week. Internet, I love Augustine Confessions. I love, love, love, love Augustine’s Confessions. I love it even when I want to throw it across the room and curse. It’s a complicated love,…
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“Hey You! Anti-Semite!”: A Jewish Krewe does Mardi Gras
…bauchery, but the parade tradition is about more than drunken tourists and cheap plastic beads. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras parades began in 1857, with the Mistick Krewe of Comus, a secret society that wanted to emulate the Mardi Gras parades of Mobile, Alabama. From the start, Mardi Gras krewes were exclusive, elite clubs. Such organizations can be important networking opportunities in a small community like New Orleans, where people are used to doin…
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Dylann Roof Was Wrong: The Race War Isn’t Coming, It’s Here
…ood from as much of the world as possible, in land, natural resources, and cheap labor. What does it mean to be born in a place that measures your value, your worth, your very life by the calculus of possession? That calculus extends through time to us from those founding greed-filled moments invading our waking consciousness and driving us forward in a strange confession. We believe in competition born of the desire to possess. We believe in stri…
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Despising the Holidays: When Christians Led the ‘War on Christmas’
…became the equivalent of a blockbuster. In the chaos of the era print was cheap and plentiful, and the collapse of the licensing laws insured a degree of free speech hitherto unknown in the British Isles. The World Turned Upside Down would prove so enduring that it has been an English folk ballad for more than 350 years. The song’s opening verse, “Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d. /Old Christmas is kicked out of Town” remains per…
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SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul
…dless of their…profession,” but I somehow doubt that sanitation workers outnumber investment bankers in SoulCycle studios (one of which is across the street from the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Tribeca). Classes with popular instructors sell out in minutes, and patrons can pay upwards of $70 per class in order to get priority booking. “Ultimately, this is what brand religion is all about: stoking emotion with a combination of scarcity and urgenc…
Read MoreSpringtime for Ross Douthat?
…y now), Gustavo Gutierrez, Marcus Borg, James Cone, Sallie McFague, or any number of other thinkers and theologians that Douthat does not recognize. The only people who want to bring back Niebuhr are conservatives. (I’m an admitted fanboy, but that’s about coming from the same church background as Niebuhr as much as anything.) And that doesn’t even get to the worst of it. Douthat misunderstands Francis’ amazing, charismatic realignment of Catholic…
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