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The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…on high as if it’s to be worshipped. We read from it and say “This is the word of the Lord” no matter what the lesson said. You do that often enough and people don’t think that’s a book to be read. It’s an untouchable. Also, we publish the Bible in columns. No other book is published that way except encyclopedias, dictionaries, and telephone books. You don’t want to read those books, you go to them for authoritative answers and you don’t argue wit…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: “They Came at Night, Trying to Kill Us!”

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…ries such as Malaysia. The unregulated movement of people across national borders is a human response to old processes, such as colonialism and imperialism, as well as new ones, including the widening and deepening of capitalism, which increasingly link us together in a common predicament and make our nation-based laws and moral maps unable to deal with the emerging complexity. As we seek solutions to the problem of undocumented immigration, we mu…

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…lling the series not enough of an “intellectual endeavor.” Furthermore, according to the Ivory Tower critics (who certainly have a deep tolerance for boredom), producers should have worried even less about viewers’ short attention spans. They have been complaining about the film’s selection of topics as well as areas missed or underexplored, from Roger Williams to Native Americans in Puritan New England to the impact of Vatican II on American Cath…

Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…ed that she had a disabled son. Here and there, Penance hurts. Between the cheap jokes and bourgeois self-loathing are murmurs worth hearing, if only as microfiction. Likewise, the app’s agnosticism facilitates a lucid tableau of spontaneous popular theology. Of the 24 confessions, only one references God as an active third party, two command the Sinner to forgive themselves, and three confessors speak in the first person as God. “God forgive me,”…

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…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…m: Is the ability to buy contraceptives, that are now widely available—my Lord, all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them—is that right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffocate the rights of conscience?” 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 whet…

Can a Greek Monastery Be Ground Zero of Global Financial Meltdown?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…nister of Finance was forced to conclude in exasperation “that it would be cheaper and more efficient to put all of Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs.” The public schools operate with surprising inefficiency, with students scoring the lowest numbers in Europe despite having four times as many teachers as Europe’s highest ranked system, in Finland. There are there separate government owned defense corporations. As for Greek health care, it is…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…immigrants who have violated US immigration laws, either by crossing the border unauthorized or overstaying their visas. Nonetheless, the word “illegal” has become so emotionally charged that it dehumanizes not only the unauthorized immigrant, who is objectified as nothing more than a faceless criminal, but those who use it uncritically. When we use the term unthinkingly, we lose the capacity to feel the moral dilemmas and the sometimes tragic pr…

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

By Ed Simon

…brations, the most famous of which in the U.S. is Mardi Gras—which saw the ordination of an “Abbot of Unreason” or the coronation of a “Lord of Misrule.” Should it be any wonder then, this state of eternal carnival? For the subjects of Strasbourg, the Abbot of Unreason found a home within their very minds, the Lord of Misrule residing in their souls. A wake for the old world Collective delusions can be triggered by collective anxieties, but what u…

When Being “Christian” Means Supporting Trump: An Argument For Hiding Your Faith

By Jonathan Malesic

…dercurrent in Christian history that supports keeping your faith secret in order to keep it from being co-opted by your political or commercial life. I wrote that secrecy was “the only way [American Christians] can prevent the continued degradation of their religious identity.” Reviewers found the argument clever and provocative but largely unconvincing, because they thought I had misdiagnosed the real dangers to Christian identity. One reviewer a…