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Gas For Two Bucks a Gallon? Bachmann Taps a Pipeline to the American Sacred

…e heady days of $2 a gallon gasoline. When Bachmann promised the return of cheap fuel, she tapped into that mythic connection between Americans and their cars. It isn’t simply that American’s worship the car or make it a sacred object; although one could not be blamed for thinking so. The Los Angeles Times reports that Americans spend almost 100 billion a year on new car purchases alone, not counting used car purchases or maintenance of existing c…

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Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

…ager for attention. The puppy piddled in the corner more than once, taking cheap shots at political adversaries (including McCain campaign apparatchiks) and using the annoying, sophomoric reference to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat” Party. But Going Rogue was not unpleasant. The second book in the Sarah Palin œuvre, however, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, crosses the line from cute puppy bouncing on his back legs…

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Richard Dawkins’ Atheist Academy of Unguided Truth

…wept. At which point he would offer Kleenexes. It was in Fr. Cavanaugh’s class that I began to see that all true education is intensely personal. Dawkins’ distaste for an officially atheist academy may be mere iconoclasm. But maybe not. Maybe it’s closer to the truth to say he could never allow the kind of intellectual openness found routinely in parochial schools around the world.  Imagine it! Who are you? Do you disbelieve in God? Why? Do you d…

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A Shining City: The Occupy Movement and the American Soul

…lizations, unrepressed by social orders that developed for the benefit of classed rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. Aspiration Meets Desperation Mostly, members of the various wedding parties were unperplexed by the protesters offering testimony against an economic system that excludes far too many Americans from the fullness of even the most modest constructions of “domestic bliss.” “That cat’s a f**king loser,” offer…

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The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

…ictim he could denigrate. He united all the Germans against the Jews. It’s cheap politics, but we still have people who know how to do that. It doesn’t lead to anything but destruction. How can reeducating ourselves about the Bible—and educating the non-religious about the Bible—help us regain the center? One of my hopes for this book is that it will provide a textbook to talk about the Bible in a new way. A local pastor doesn’t have to actually s…

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How To Control Your Ungodly Urges… On a Budget!

…der… like the fact that you or someone you know might have Debra Barone’s plasma coursing through their veins. 3. This might be controversial, but if you face truly irresistible urges to spout some hateful epithet, you could always… (blush)… tweet it at yourself. 4. Get married! This will make you TOO TIRED for harassing people, LOL amirite married folks? 5. When your feverish and overblown imagination gets worked up over what you baselessly imagi…

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A Truly Fearless Human Being: Rev. Howard Moody, 1921-2012

…. But what may ultimately be most endearing was his gift for exploding the cheap piety we’re still imprisoned by as we head toward the 2012 elections. Nowhere was this on display more prominently than in his distinction as the first author to have the word “fuck” printed in the Village Voice. In “Toward a New Definition of Obscenity,” Moody, who had by 1965 screened banned films in church and registered voters in the South, wrote that: For Christi…

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Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

…r hoary ear for $6.84. Penance’s religiosity is well incapsulated in its splash screen. We find a paraphrase a letter of Saint Ignatius, reworked for a quite different model of religious social networking. The original had read, “To all them that repent, the Lord grants forgiveness, if they turn in penitence to the unity of God, and to communion with the bishop.” Penance’s splash screen, on the other hand, is agnostic even concerning its own effic…

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Can a Greek Monastery Be Ground Zero of Global Financial Meltdown?

…they call us a corporation,” he observes. “But I ask you… what company has lasted for 1,000 years?”  It is an interesting rhetorical ploy, but it is a question with an obvious answer. The Roman Empire. The Catholic Church. The Byzantine Empire. The Orthodox Church. All corporations. All lasting more than a millennium.  In more ways than have been understood to date, Greece has become Ground Zero of the global meltdown, the epicenter of a shockwave…

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