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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

…e are also more sympathetic people who still assume TST is an elaborate put-on. There is a degree of smugness that accompanies this view: People who assert it imply they have “figured out the joke” and everyone else is still catching up to them. It’s true that TST began with a series of prank-like political actions. But this view assumes there is nothing to TST beyond what the media reports. They have no idea TST chapters all over the country are…

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

By Barbra Barnett

…re was the Krewe du Jieux, a marching club in Krewe Delusion that uses anti-anti-Semitic comedy as its theme. Dressed up as bankers, judges, and media moguls, complete with plastic noses and blue horns, krewe members schlepped alongside a float that proclaimed a Jieux World Order. Think Borat, and then some. How did this come about, and what were they thinking? Everyone knows that Mardi Gras is about public drinking and debauchery, but the parade…

Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

…rity than that of victim. The book fairly bristles with resentment and self-pity about “the politically-motivated attacks that began the day I was announced as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008.” Perhaps that, in the end, accounts for her popularity. We live in an age where victimization carries undeniable cachet. If you can somehow make the case that you’ve been treated unfairly or that your tribe (Republicans, “patriotic America…

The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

By Frederick Clarkson

…r, into far-right belief systems. For instance, we know for a fact that neo-Nazi and white-supremacist organizations have made an active effort not merely to recruit members of the military, but also to have their members join the military and obtain combat training and experience. We know from FBI reports that they’ve had at least some success in doing this. Then there are paranoid, black-helicopter types from the Patriot movement who are recruit…

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

By Andrew Aghapour

…. I think the problem comes when they think that they have to put their awe-inspiring myths in competition with the equally – or I would say more – awe-inspiring 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 breathtaki…

Springtime for Ross Douthat?

By Daniel Schultz

…form.” It’s that he does all that, and then, like a cherry high atop a five-scoop sundae of stupid, he throws this in: “In the intellectual arena, religiously-inclined liberals have pined for a Reinhold Niebuhr without producing one.” Hmm. The only person I know of pining for Reinhold Niebuhr is David Brooks. If that’s your definition of a liberal, God help us all. No, liberal Christians these days have moved on from Niebuhr, who after all ended h…

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

By Ed Simon

…a boycott, apparently.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti629wLy4vU The so-called “War on Christmas” has been a staple of right-wing culture warriors for generations now, seemingly so incensed over people saying “Happy Holidays” that they can’t help but resort to hyperbole so bizarre that you can’t tell if it’s parody or not. It’s this perennially aggrieved attitude that allows a writer at Breitbart.com to claim that the decision of a massive pri…

On Eve of Sudan Split Clashes Continue

By Ashley Makar

…l soon split in two: an African Christian-majority South and an Arab Muslim-majority North. On July 9, the Southern Sudanese government is expected to declare independence from the Islamist regime in Khartoum, the final step in the process that will officially end a half-century of civil wars. But the prospects of a peaceful independence day look bleak. There is renewed conflict in two distinct regions on the border between Northern and Southern S…

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

By Peter Laarman

…d in Christianity Today and elsewhere, where scholars and cranks play whack-a-mole with Bible verses having to do with debt. What I like best is the Can we proof-text this? We probably shouldn’t. But let’s try anyway! aspect of it. Not to mention the dominant focus on rival passages in the Hebrew Bible without much, if any, attention paid to how Jesus responded to debt peonage in his time and place. Stefani McDade begins her Christianity Today rou…

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

By Shaul Magid

…mmigration in the late 1980s brought a large group of secular Jews (and non-Jews) who, being the victims of anti-Semitism, have little or no sympathy for the Arabs; whether citizens of Arab countries, Israeli citizens, or inhabitants of the West Bank. Finally, and most interestingly, the Haredim, or Ultra Orthodox. This group, mostly descended from Eastern European Jews, were traditionally (and confusingly to outsiders) actually anti-Zionist and n…