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Is the Satanic Temple Just an Elaborate Prank? 10 Questions for the Author of ‘Speak of the Devil’

By Joseph Laycock

…Most Americans claim to value tolerance and religious freedom. But talk is cheap, especially if you have never seriously thought about what these commitments might actually mean in a pluralistic society. I was disturbed to read some of TST’s Christian opponents openly renouncing religious freedom if it meant respecting the freedoms of Satanists. I also think TST is forcing the public to think more critically about what “religion” is. They are dire…

“Hey You! Anti-Semite!”: A Jewish Krewe does Mardi Gras

By Barbra Barnett

…. Historians and journalists of 1960s New Orleans society observed that in order to avoid embarrassment (presumably for the sake of both themselves and their friends and neighbors), Jews who could afford to leave town during carnival season did. But times have changed, in New Orleans and nationwide, since 1964—and while organizations like the ADL continue to monitor self-declared anti-Semitism, numbers are down in the long term. The advance of so…

Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

…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…

The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

By Frederick Clarkson

…bulwark against fascism, but that too many “seem to have developed an extraordinary boiled frog kind of tolerance for the increasing ugliness of their own movement.” Is the mainstream conservative bulwark holding, or is it about to rain frogs and hot water? Actually, it hasn’t held for some time now. That’s part of my critique—namely, that the normative, non-movement conservatives have been standing by and watching and abetting while conservatism…

Churches Can No Longer Hide the Truth: Daniel Dennett on the New Transparency

By Andrew Aghapour

…ing discoveries of science. Gods and flaming chariots are nothing, they’re cheap comic book fare, compared to what we actually have learned about stars and galaxies and the like. I think that there’s a sort of mirror image, an opposite of scientism, which has a real tin ear for the breathtaking awesomeness of science. All you have to do is listen to David Attenborough or Carl Sagan or other brilliant expositors of science to see just how jaw-dropp…

Springtime for Ross Douthat?

By Daniel Schultz

…ands Francis’ amazing, charismatic realignment of Catholic priorities as a cheap publicity stunt to get hippies in the pew. He completely misunderstands Francis’ speech to Congress as plumping for liberal values—and I’m not entirely sure he gets that Martin Luther King wasn’t a Catholic. On and on it goes. Douthat snipes at “a liberalism that thinks it can impose meaning on a cosmos whose sound and fury signifies nothing on its own,” without bothe…

Despising the Holidays: When Christians Led the ‘War on Christmas’

By Ed Simon

…gland. The Puritans saw Christmas as tainted by “popery,” (after all, the word ends with “Mass,” which had also been abolished) and identified its extra-biblical elements as dangerously pagan. In England there was fierce resistance to this attempt to regulate Christmas, where, as scholars like Eamon Duffy have demonstrated, the Reformation was hardly as seamless or as popular as triumphalist Protestant historiography has often portrayed it. During…

On Eve of Sudan Split Clashes Continue

By Ashley Makar

…to Jerusalem or to a university. After he crossed from Egypt into Israel, border guards took him to immigration prison. Months later, he was handed over to an Israeli employment agency to be a source of cheap labor in Eilat—the bottom tip of the country, where the Negev meets the Red Sea, and where Sudanese and Eritrean refugees do the service jobs that support the tourism industry. William’s people are no strangers to exploitation. He told me tha…

Evangelicals Clutching Pearls Over Student Debt Relief: Lord Have Mercy!

By Peter Laarman

…the New Deal coalition and the end (for those who had enjoyed it) of the Fordist economic order of male breadwinners and traditional families. Opposition to broad redistribution on the basis of racial chauvinism dovetailed in a mutually reinforcing fashion with opposition to redistribution as part of the basis for a new order of shareholder dominance. The rise of the student loan, in other words, is tied to this larger story of the transformation…

Of Zionism and Anti-Zionism: The Ultra Orthodox and the Settler Movement in Israel

By Shaul Magid

…ess ideological than experiential, and thus more open to change. In other words, as “facts on the ground,” they are open to being transplanted if the conditions are right. While this may be true of the Russian population and other non-ideological Jews living in the settlements, the Haredi community is distinct for at least two reasons. First, they will generally listen to their rabbis and could conceivably move en masse. Second, they have the numb…