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Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

…d Purgatory. The autobiography was, as I suspected, pretty insubstantial, filled with morality-play vignettes from childhood and recitations of the author’s meteoric rise to national prominence. But it was not nearly as bad as I feared—kind of endearing, actually, like a cute little puppy tap-dancing frenetically on the kitchen floor, eager for attention. The puppy piddled in the corner more than once, taking cheap shots at political adversaries (…

The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

By Frederick Clarkson

…d daily on none other than Armed Forces Radio. Tell us a bit more, if you will, about imprecatory prayer in the military, and in particular, your thoughts about how it has affected anyone’s behavior, if we know. And if we don’t know… how do you think it might? Imprecatory prayer among members of the military takes on a much more threatening aspect if it occurs in combination with certain other potentially lethal trends. One of these is the very re…

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

By Andrew Aghapour

…this has been an issue for Muslim children. Are they going to let their children have cell phones and be on the Internet? If they forbid them, that’s going to be very tough, and if they permit them, they’re going to introduce a huge new force into the world of child rearing and education. Religious education is going to have to make some drastic shifts. And it’ll be interesting to see how it works. This is still hinged on belief. This next genera…

Springtime for Ross Douthat?

By Daniel Schultz

…if it dies, it bears much fruit,” I’ll take back everything I said about this column—and maybe one or two other things. In the meantime, this liberal Christian will take a smiling Pope over a know-nothing columnist any day of the week, and twice on Sunday….

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

By Ed Simon

…reductionist ‘culture wars’ obscure the nuances of history and culture, while failing to recognize the full complexity of both secularism and religion. This year’s tempest in a coffee cup has provided us all with an unintended lesson in semiotics. That someone might see Christianity in reindeer and snow-flakes (neither of which are mentioned in scripture) but not in the color red (which could certainly be anything from Christ’s blood to Eucharist…

On Eve of Sudan Split Clashes Continue

By Ashley Makar

…adig Babo Nimr told the BBC, “Abyei for us is a matter of survival, so we will fight until the last man.” They Can Break Your Leg, But They Can’t Break Your Mind William has lines across his forehead in rows of concentric curves—a ritual scar to signify his tribe, the Dinka Ngok. “Since the time that I’m tired, until this moment,” he told me, “it’s like a fire in my heart.” He says he’s been tired since 1965, almost twenty years before he was born…

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

By Peter Laarman

…tting something that they don’t “deserve” and haven’t “earned.” My friend Bill McKibben nailed this a long time ago. He suggested that instead of calling it Christianity, it would be more accurate to label what we have here as “Franklinity,” after that epitome of thrift and industry, good old Philadelphia Ben. McKibben’s gibe shouldn’t distract us, however. This is the dominant form of (American) Christianity today—both the social group and the pu…

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

By Shaul Magid

…When you have a society that is essentially middle-class averaging seven children per family with a very low infant mortality rate and a life-expectancy similar to the most developed societies, you have a society that will grow at an abnormal, or “unnatural,” rate. Grandparents with an excess of forty or fifty grandchildren and great-grandchildren are not uncommon in the Haredi world in Israel. In developing countries with a similar birth rate, th…

Four Reasons Why Egypt’s Revolution Is Islamic

By Zaid Hassan

…t new Islamic energies will be unleashed. Until now, Islamic political philosophy has failed to answer the question of why Western-style democracies are more effective than rival political systems. It is entirely feasible that the current waves of change, triggered by Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and elsewhere, could unleash new waves of Islamic political thought. We could see the emergence of an Islamic Rawls, revitalizing the entire field o…

A Shining City: The Occupy Movement and the American Soul

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ously high-heeled shoes. They sipped from splits of cheap sparkling wine while their tuxedoed companions swilled the local brew, Budweiser—that, too, a faded American icon, sold off in 2008 to the Belgium-based multinational, InBev. No, of course, these were not the protesters who have begun to appear in more and more American cities, but keepers of the once-stable base of a certain version of the fabled American Dream: wedding parties. These were…