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Faith-Based Initiatives in the Obama Administration?

By Bill Berkowitz

…kind to religious right organizations, including the one that he founded in 1994 with religious right money—the National Fatherhood Initiative in Gaithersburg, Maryland.” Horn gave “the National Fatherhood Initiative a … ‘Capacities Building’ grant in the amount of $999,534 from a program he started in his agency and called by the familiar-ringing name of the ‘Responsible Fatherhood Initiative.’” Horn “approved the hiring of columnist Maggie Galla…

Five Flood Stories You Didn’t Know About

By Ingrid Lilly

…light on the flood hero’s excruciating experience. Dated somewhere between 1200-900 BCE, the Mesopotamian epic says little about the divine drama. We only hear that “the hearts of the gods were moved to inflict the flood.” The rest of the tale focuses on the flood hero, who builds an ark in a brave abandonment of his wealth: “tear down the house and build a boat; abandon wealth and seek living beings; spurn possessions and keep alive living being…

Sister Rose and a Teenager’s First Headscarf

By Shabana Mir

…ther things. I was always a rather thoughtful child, inclined to moral and spiritual reflection. And in my early teens, an urge to seek a deeper spiritual life welled up inside me. It was not something I understood terribly well. The milieu was Pakistan in the 1980s, mildly mutinous under General Zia’s “Islamic” dictatorship. Most people I knew were more concerned about worldly matters than about spiritual quests. Perhaps Sister Rose would underst…

Update: Mubarak Steps Down; The Crash After Mubarak’s Speech

By H.A. Hellyer

…f “rapture” in religion, where the human being has become so overcome by a spiritual state, he loses control, temporarily, of himself. Spiritual masters warn in medieval texts of letting that kind of state run away with one, because it can be so undirected and disperses one’s focus on the Divine itself. I also recalled how for so long, people considered religion to be the opiate of the masses – but that in this situation, it was their political si…

A New Thing: On the Quest for a Biblical Politics

By Garret Keizer

Behold, I am doing a new thing. Isaiah 43.19 1. Of theological projects perhaps none is so vexed as that of trying to develop a biblically-based politics in the context of a secular democratic state. The available models, which roughly correspond to Hebrew and Christian portions of Scripture, are tribal and theocratic in the first case; apocalyptic and apolitical in the second. Neither provides an easy or applicable blueprint for active citizensh…

American Fever: A Tale of Romance and Pestilence

By Michael A. Elliott

…a cure for the virus. Instead, the Internet is what allows the narrator to manage his survival, both through his writing and through his business. It is also what creates the experience of the novel. Though Hall plans to publish American Fever in book form after its conclusion, I don’t think the experience of reading it in print will be as rich as reading it on the screen. Much of what makes American Fever tick is in the way that it can blur the f…

In Markets We Trust

By Peter Laarman

…in reading Jack Beatty’s Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900. Beatty’s meticulously researched volume reminded me that the money changers have attempted to seize democracy’s temple before—that by the late 1880s the railroad barons in particular could work their will with little or no resistance in Congress and the state legislatures. The difference then was that everyday people fought back, and they fought back from a reli…

Mainline Protestantism a Shambles? Tell Us Something We Haven’t Heard

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…o stand for nothing except vague and gooey middle-class niceness. —Clueless 19th-century rationalist holdovers who still believe it’s possible to look at things objectively because, I don’t know, our schooling was so full of Moustache Grooming 101, practicums in The Care of Tweed Frock Coats, and private lessons in Somber Intonation that we simply never got around to critiques of modernity, or something. Pretty impressive, no? An outside observer…

White People Dying Younger Because of…Moral Turpitude? Give Us a Break

By Peter Laarman

…homas Sowell. But Reno opens a huge hole in his argument by analogizing the 15-year spike in death rates for middle-aged U.S. whites to similar sharp spikes in mortality in post-World War II Europe and in post-1989 Russia. Quite obviously, the widespread failure-to-thrive in bombed-out postwar societies and again following the “free market” shock treatment administered to the Russians in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse was all about basic…

Religious Freedom is Impossible… Compared to What?

By Austin Dacey

…f equal respect and equal protection for all citizens, regardless of their spiritual and normative commitments. This much is apparent in the language of fairness, equity, and equality that recurs throughout her work. Weiner is reading Sullivan too narrowly. Koppelman has another challenge. In order to cope with multiplicity, he says, “law must simplify.” Accommodation must take place under some description. That description must somehow pick out v…