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Four Reasons Why Egypt’s Revolution Is Islamic

By Zaid Hassan

…on-Muslims to support those ideals while transcending easy stereotypes and cheap fear-mongering. We should therefore pause in our reactions and ask ourselves; perhaps an Islamic revolution in Egypt is not de facto a bad thing. Finally, I’m reminded of Karen Armstrong’s description of the historical mission Muslims are tasked with: “In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical missio…

A Shining City: The Occupy Movement and the American Soul

By Elizabeth Drescher

…s, economic hope, and nascent global expansionism. Women wore shiny off-the-shoulder dresses and ridiculously 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 keeper…

Why Conservatives Really Oppose Federal Aid for the ‘Undeserving’

By Daniel Schultz

…he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, to the more up-to-date proclamation that the economy should reopen to save the stock market, even if it meant potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths. Some of them really seem to believe that rich people are better than everybody else. I suppose the “to be fair” part of this is to say that Congressional Republicans believe it’s important to fuel industries that employ thousands direc…

Must We Burn Something to Get Attention?: 50 Years After the Catonsville Nine

By Jason C. Bivins

…ole world is now the land of burning children. So, too, has America’s never-ending war (who are we fighting now, again?) marched on. There is fire in the way we imagine other humans burning for the failure of not being like us. This fire is in our communities, at our borders, in our hashtags. Where, then, is religious protest today? What will we look back on about the religious protest of the new Poor People’s Movement? Of Black Lives Matter? Of a…

SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

By Michael Schulson

…tationary biking class—a.k.a. spinning—into a fashionable, upper-crust, New-Agey-communal experience. SoulCycle classes involve candles, loud music, in-sync cycling, and exhortative therapy-speak from instructors, many of whom sideline as models. The spiritual dimensions are sometimes explicit—note the “Soul” and the dharmachakra-esque logo. The phenomenon has been described as a church, a cult, and, more cholerically, as “the most mindless versio…

‘People You May Know’ Reveals a War on Democracy Being Waged With Big Data

By Chrissy Stroop

…n the UK. There’s a story that just broke in the past week. We have a track-and-trace system—it’s not working very well, but a track-and-trace system in Britain for COVID. And you go into a pub, and you have to download an app. You put your details in. And that’s fine, but the pub didn’t build the app, a third party built the app. And we’re now hearing people say that pubs and restaurants have been selling this data to data brokers. But I’ll bet y…

The Birth of Un-Cool: How Disgusted Liberals Became Neoconservatives

By Michelle Goldberg

…t when fashion shifted, and the lefty mascots once glorified for their salt-of-the-earth authenticity suddenly appeared gauche and irrational and actually pretty threatening. He captured, in other words, the birth of the neoconservative spirit. Something similar seems to be happening today among urbane, bourgeois, conservative intellectuals. For years, they’ve lionized (and patronized) Christian fundamentalists and various southern populists with…

Watching Preachers’ Daughters Right After the Boston Bombings While Teaching a Class on Augustine’s Confessions

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ews that a child has died. But when I heard about Martin Richard, the eight-year-old bombing victim, my mind did what human brains do—tried to explain the incomprehensible in terms of the familiar—and discovered to its horror that there was a lot that seemed familiar. From Martin Richard’s gap-toothed grin, to the way his “No More Hurting People” sign was clearly carefully printed yet switched between upper and lower case, to the long eyelashes th…

Body Language: Michael Jackson and the Illogic of White Superiority

By Anthony B. Pinn

…e and physical alterations speak to this destructive dimension of our socio-cultural world. As Michael Dyson noted, Michael Jackson displayed on and through his body the love/hate relationship with self-image faced by many African Americans. But there is more to Michael Jackson’s appearance than this. Yes, he depicted in graphic ways the destructive nature of myopic beauty standards that African Americans battled against. However, Jackson’s transf…

First Things First: Sexual Equality Just Is

By Kate Blanchard

…rence to same-sex couples, since they wouldn’t fit into his complementarity-of-the-sexes model in which “we long for what is missing in ourselves.” But despite their sex acts being supposedly “self-referential,” gay men may be having more sex than average, while studies among lesbians suggest that men just aren’t that good at satisfying women sexually. June Cleaver might have let Ward have his way with her, but today’s women may not feel obligated…