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There’s No Business Like the Bible Business: 200 Years of the ABS

By Paul Harvey

…s, which did the actual distributing of the sacred texts. The ABS produced cheap, text-only Bibles, sold at cost and distributed through “branch societies,” and thus undercut competitors. If you wanted notes, commentary, or maps, you would have to look elsewhere; the ABS focused on sola scriptura, with the faith that the words alone, guided by the Holy Spirit, would effect transformations in the lives of individuals. If there’s one thing that Amer…

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…

I Agree: Critical Race Theory is Indeed Incompatible With Southern Baptist Convention’s ‘Faith and Message’

By Miguel A. De La Torre

…nchised can be dismissed as unbiblical. They could feel good about the anti-racist proclamation they made, and even express righteous indignation if accused of being racist. In all honesty, not knowing the state of their souls, they very well may not be racist. However, by silencing communities of color, they’re not only engaging in racist acts (if it quacks like a duck, etc), but they’re also fortifying the racism of Southern Baptist seminaries s…

Richard Dawkins’ Atheist Academy of Unguided Truth

By Paul Wallace

…se called “Biblical Archaeology,” in which the points of compliance and non-compliance between the biblical record and archaeology were pointed out; wide-ranging and fully scientific introductions to biological and cosmic evolution; and a Christian history course in which none of the horrors committed by the church, so thoroughly trumpeted by Dawkins and others, were skipped over or airbrushed. Then there was the king daddy of them all: Father Cav…

“Godly Or Bad?”: The Return of Ted Haggard

By J. Terry Todd

…p motels with his wife Gayle and two of their five children as he went door-to-door, selling life insurance to strangers. From the pinnacle of evangelical leadership to this? Pelosi later told an interviewer that the story of Haggard’s exile was too compelling in its complexity to pass up. How the mighty had fallen! She brought along her camera, and the Trials of Ted Haggard was born. Pelosi’s documentary introduces us to the man behind the headli…

In Hamline Case, the ‘Free Expression vs. Religious Sensibilities’ Frame Obscures a Stark Reality About Higher Education

By Junaid Jahangir

…when it comes to pay, benefits, leave, promotion, and job security. Divide-and-rule is not a new tactic, for it’s well known in the Indian subcontinent that the British pitted one local Raja against the other based on tribe, religion, or caste—among other factors. The same applies to corporations as they stoke divisiveness in society by indulging in performative activism. They misdirect the attention of people towards who said what and why and aw…

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

By Tom Davis

…. 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…

Can I Get Some Birth Control Pills With That Slushie?: Unpacking the Contraceptive Mandate Rollback

By Sunnivie Brydum

…oundation, birth control comprises between 30 and 44 percent of women’s out-of-pocket health care spending. For marginalized groups, the impact is likely to be especially severe because funding for the contraceptive safety-net provider, Planned Parenthood, is also under attack. But the biggest effect is likely to be felt on access to the “LARCs” (long-acting reversible contraceptives) like IUDs and implants, since they are the most expensive. The…

Why the ‘Confession & Redemption’ Path is Unlikely to Help Falwell Recover from Sex Scandal

By Chrissy Stroop

…in his denial of Granda’s narrative. Monday offered plenty of exciting will-he-or-won’t-he drama around Falwell’s resignation, which Liberty’s board claimed had been tendered, only to have Falwell deny the claim and insist on further negotiations, after which Falwell reversed himself late Monday night and announced he was resigning after all. But mostly it offered schadenfreude, resulting in plenty of jokes from those who find catharsis in seeing…

The Social Science Animal: Brooks Argues for Emotion over Reason

By Beatrice Marovich

…d aims seem so uncannily similar to his) seems to leave Brooks a bit tongue-tied and awkward in front of her. There’s even an uncomfortable sexual tension between the two of them. When he has her (as a young woman) get dressed up in a suit, for example, he tells us that she looks something like a “ghetto Doris Day,” exoticizing her Chinese-Chicana lineage (claiming that this “explains” her attractiveness). He talks about her hard abs. At one point…