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Dilemmas of American Empire: Can Obama Pull Off a Game-Changer in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan?

By Gary Dorrien

…s are forming their own militias and creating new leaders adept at cutting deals and getting access to money that was supposed to pay for reconstruction. The predatory corruption of government officials and connected tribal leaders is pervasive, direct, and unrelenting, which helps to explain why $200 billion of reconstruction aid has produced almost no reconstruction. Iraq could explode again at any time, because Sunni leaders are demanding real…

Worse Than the Robber Barons

By Peter Laarman

…hese new-class elites take advantage of special tax breaks and other sweet deals even as they continue to make the rules for everyone else and even as they decide what interest rates we drones will have to pay and what level of taxation we will have to bear. Do not expect Main Street’s visceral rage over such presumptions of privilege—and over the special moral exemptions the excessively overprivileged carve out for themselves—to subside anytime…

First Baptist Church, Sutherland Springs Texas

Can Government Solve The Evil Of Mass Shootings? A Response to Mollie Hemingway

By Daniel Schultz

…w the nation’s fourth-worst gun massacre (the shootings in Las Vegas being number one), was “only the 14th mass murder at an American house of worship since 1963.” Only! We have to have rankings of such things now, complete with charts detailing deadly incidents at faith properties… and by denomination? The interminable debate about prayers-vs.-action was back, too. As soon as politicians started tweeting their standard lines about “thoughts and p…

Shopping for Your Kids, Bioethically Speaking

By Arri Eisen

…re or less, the instructions in the first paragraph: go to a Web site that deals in eggs and sperm, contact the brokers therein, pay for the ‘best’ eggs and sperm you can afford from the best sources (‘best’ as determined by things like the jobs and grades of those whose sperm and eggs you are ‘using’), find a fertility clinic, pay the clinic to mix the eggs and sperm and put the resulting fertilized eggs into a surrogate mom (found, for example,…

Romney Baffled by Own Party

By Sarah Posner

…Jim Heath asked Romney, “Blunt-Rubio is being debated later this week that deals with allowing employers to ban providing female contraception,” to which Romney provided the above answer. Then a Romney campaign spokesman told TPM, “Regarding the Blunt bill, the way the question was asked was confusing. Governor Romney supports the Blunt Bill because he believes in a conscience exemption in health care for religious institutions and people of faith…

Vatican Unhappy with Obama’s Ambassador Picks

By Frances Kissling

…ligion or both and how the US and the UN should relate to the Vatican. Any number of experts on international law suggests that the Vatican does not meet enough of the criteria to be recognized as a state. It has no permanent population; the thousand or so citizens are only citizens as long as they are employed by the Vatican (and of course the fact that there are no more than a dozen women or children among those thousand goes unmentioned.) The V…

RDBook: The End of the World As We Know It

By Gabriel Mckee

…’s “Judgment Passed” (incidentally the only story original to this volume) deals directly with Left Behind, describing the experience of a group of astronauts who return to Earth after a general rapture has removed every human from the face of the earth (presumably to be sorted out elsewhere). Oltion’s story has a certain smugness, which Adams encapsulates in his introduction to the story: “Oltion has strong views on religion—namely that it’s a sc…

Wild Goose Festival’s (Mostly) Welcoming Spirit for LGBT Christians

By Kristin Rawls

…homophobe. Ask God what He thinks,” she said, before shutting off her microphone to complain, “There is always someone who wants to catch me.” Shocked was not challenged by organizers or staff. Some of the less-than-affirming messages came from official programming. Tony and Peggy Campolo gave their much-practiced talk, touted in the program as “a model of how to disagree agreeably,” about their differences on the matter of LGBT affirmation (she’s…

A King for Jesus: What the Religious Right Sees in Trump

By Roger O. Friedland

…ent with strong religious beliefs. Trump cannot even pretend to qualify. A number of analysts, particularly liberal ones, see it as the big reveal, that the Christian right is right, not Christian. The political right has captured the Christians, not the reverse. It’s about politics, class and honor, not God. Arlie Hochschild, in her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, based on her ethnography of Calcasieu Parish in Southern Louisiana, explores…

Pope Francis’ Love Letter is an Opportunity Lost

By Mary E. Hunt

…ries and counting. In still another dubious section, “sex education [that] deals primarily with ‘protection’ through the practice of ‘safe sex’” is said to “convey a negative attitude towards the natural procreative finality of sexuality, as if an eventual child were an enemy to be protected against. This way of thinking promotes narcissism and aggressivity in place of acceptance.” What? Don’t teach safe sex because it might imply that every heter…