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Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse

By Peter Laarman

…olk worried about more than just computer failure. And then there are the millions and millions who could not and still cannot get enough of the Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind potboilers. At least LaHaye and Jenkins were smart enough to honor Jesus’ warning that “no one knows the day or the hour.” It made good business sense for them to honor it: the co-authors preferred to keep people guessing—and keep their book sales flowing. I was on…

Hajj Journal: Tawaf: How I Fell in Love…

By Amina Wadud

…s, such that one of us stood guard over the other—double safe. Anyway, I really got used to the necessity of the jostle and the necessity of the inconvenience. But still, I would draw the line: jostle there, but not in the shops to buy cheap token souvenirs made in China….

The Moral Bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Asceticism

By Vlad Chituc

…sn’t to wildly deregulate and make transient consumption so cheap that the rich are no longer burdened by ownership. I don’t want to live the illusion of a simple life because I’m renting the frills….

The Problem with Christian Gentlemen: A Short Goodbye to Ted Cruz, the “Mr. Pecksniff” of Presidential Politics

By Peter Laarman

…d self-congratulation. Dickens makes the most of Pecksniff by giving him a number of interior monologues, as here when Pecksniff is rationalizing his decision to pimp out his younger daughter at a rather cheap dowry price to a rich but grotesquely uncouth suitor: All his life long he had been walking up and down the narrow ways and by-places, with a hook in one hand and a crook in the other, scraping all sorts of valuable odds and ends into his po…

Lindsey Graham’s Lying “Eye-ranians”

By Haroon Moghul

…d. Microsoft Word told me, and Microsoft Word is a real American, because Bill Gates is American. Those of you using iPhones, by the way, are probably Iranians and should be detained or deported. Because Steve Jobs was part Syrian, and Syria is part Iranian, which means your iPhone auto-correct is lying to you. Come to think of it, how do we know Lindsey Graham is not lying to us? How do we know Lindsey Graham’s not an Iranian? What if he’s the Ma…

Dylann Roof Was Wrong: The Race War Isn’t Coming, It’s Here

By Willie James Jennings

…Daniel Lee Simmons was reported to have said, “We are here to combat hate-filled actions with love-filled actions.” I am a theologian who struggles to grasp how black folks, century after century, can forgive, how we are called on in torturous repetition to forgive those who kill us, and we do it. The only way I can fathom this grace of forgiveness offered is if the very life of God flows through people like these black families. It does. But I al…

Why Conservatives Really Oppose Federal Aid for the ‘Undeserving’

By Daniel Schultz

…th public money, but not so everyone else. It’s OK to give Boeing tens of billions of dollars in relief aid. It’s OK to give corporations access to unlimited and cheap money from the Federal Reserve. But it’s not OK to give normal people an extra $600 a week, people who are at the same time being coaxed by billionaires into going back to work even at the risk of death. It goes almost without saying that there’s more than a little connection betwee…

SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

By Michael Schulson

…and Los Angeles (which, together, account for 95% of SoulCycle’s revenue) will be willing to drop $30+ in order to pedal in unison with strangers, listening to messages of empowerment, growth, and self-actualization. But SoulCycle is also part of a larger gamble: namely, that Americans will be willing to meld the forms of spirituality and the forms of capitalism in more and more blatant ways. In this, SoulCycle has a lot in common with prosperity…

Springtime for Ross Douthat?

By Daniel Schultz

…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…

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

By Ed Simon

…s and Connecticut made the celebration of Christmas punishable by a five shilling fine. The contemporary Christian Right often claims that the New England Puritans are their intellectual ancestors, but this is willfully misreading the historical record as surely as creationists misread biological evidence. Contemporary American fundamentalism, from its pre-millennial dispensationalist eschatology to its free-market economic ideology is at odds wit…