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In a Time of Irrational Fear and New Media: The Deadly ‘Dance Plague’ at 500

By Ed Simon

…adness of Crowds, that during times of social disarray we “find that whole communities … become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it”—or dance after it. Europe on the verge of modernity was a culture very much in a particular sort of disarray; old certainties were being questioned, political systems were rapidly changing, in some instances a dangerous new sense of nationalism was emerging in individual states, the media exp…

Noah v. Kitschy Jesus: A Tale of Two Movies

By Jay Michaelson

…he bromides of politicians—I can’t quite pinpoint what all of these had in common, except that they were cheap, over-simplified, and kitschy. And thanks to Walter Benjamin, Clement Greenberg, the Frankfurt School, and a legion of writers and musicians allergic to the cliché, I came to reject kitsch and its quasi-fascistic associations. Feel this way, think this way, act this way—no! It took another several years before I really understood that som…

After Orlando: Love Wins, But When?

By Daniel Schultz

…et your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us. Yes, Lord, come quickly. Fix this mess we have gotten ourselves into. Like any psalmist, I want God’s justice to come down with great might and rubbish the evildoers: the unjust, the oppressors, the violent. But speed isn’t how God operates. The Lord’s omnipotence is often misunderstood on this point. What it means is that there is no force or object strong enough to withstand the str…

Lindsey Graham’s Lying “Eye-ranians”

By Haroon Moghul

…e 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 Manchurian—or should I say Mazandaranian!—candidate, and not our crypto-Muslim communist atheist Kenyan Hawaiian President Obama? But rest assured, my fellow Americans. I know Lindsey Graham is not an Ira…

An Open Letter to Black Clergy on the Disdain for Protest

By Rev. Osagyefo Sekou

…he description” of Jesus. America, like Rome, is an Empire. Ferguson has become America’s Nazareth—communities struggling to make a dollar out of fifteen cents, mustering up enough courage to resist the Empire. When the church defends state agents against the oppressed, we betray the essential truth of the gospel, in which a poor and over-policed person defeated the Empire. Perhaps, there’s an even greater contradiction. The very people whose work…

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…

Springtime for Ross Douthat?

By Daniel Schultz

…ands Francis’ amazing, charismatic realignment of Catholic priorities as a cheap publicity stunt to get hippies in the pew. He completely misunderstands Francis’ speech to Congress as plumping for liberal values—and I’m not entirely sure he gets that Martin Luther King wasn’t a Catholic. On and on it goes. Douthat snipes at “a liberalism that thinks it can impose meaning on a cosmos whose sound and fury signifies nothing on its own,” without bothe…

Can I Get Some Birth Control Pills With That Slushie?: Unpacking the Contraceptive Mandate Rollback

By Sunnivie Brydum

…l or religious objections” to contraception with proven improved health outcomes that accompany access to preventive and reproductive healthcare. Do you think the administration—or anyone at HHS or DOL, which allegedly drafted this rule—has any idea how to balance those competing ideals? Or is this draft a 125-page attempt to avoid answering that question entirely? PM: The original exemption for religious nonprofits did balance the question of a “…

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

By Andrew Aghapour

…ing 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 breathtaking awesomeness of science. All you have to do is listen to David Attenborough or Carl Sagan or other brilliant expositors of science to see just how jaw-dropp…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…e?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…