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

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…tes I’ve ever watched run for office and I would be embarrassed at almost any one of them being the president of the United States. If the Democrats had any sense they’d run against the Ebeneezer Scrooge Republican Party because they keep running around saying, “Bah, humbug,” and anybody that’s poor ought to stay poor because they probably deserve to be poor and we’ll tax them a little more to be sure they remain poor. I don’t know why they think…

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

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…ion, and economic turmoil in their home countries. They have come in large numbers, many of them undocumented, settling among poor South Africans who often resent their presence. While the situation confronting immigrants and poor natives in the United States is not as dire, there are clear signs of simmering tensions around the issue of undocumented immigration, particularly in poor rural communities and around towns that witnessed factory shutdo…

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…a few more major themes. No doubt creating a television documentary about any historical topic requires a reduction in complexity and nuance. But so does delivering a good lecture and writing a good monograph. Yet scholars tend to hold filmmakers to different standards than they hold their academic peers, and they are much too dismissive of the former. While we may be reluctant to admit it, we all simplify complexity, we all reduce our narratives…

Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…hat both penances were accepted. Penance, an application released for the iPhone in early December, allows users to absolve one another’s sins. After passing the application’s obligatory security PIN system (conventional online security measures are the app’s primary faith-orientation), you come to an interface resembling a confessional booth. Through the left door you can “confess,” offering your sins to whoever is listening; behind the closed do…

The Problem with Christian Gentlemen: A Short Goodbye to Ted Cruz, the “Mr. Pecksniff” of Presidential Politics

By Peter Laarman

…of fidelity is somehow the gold standard of personal ethics, overlooking any problems related to higher-level double dealing and self-promotion. I am not a Trump fan, obviously. He flunks anyone’s reasonable test on sins of the flesh AND sins of the spirit. But give me the fleshly sinner over the Pecksniffian moralist any day. We can’t find it possible to say, “Goodbye, Ted: We hardly knew ye.” But we will most certainly find it possible to say,…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…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 whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should…

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

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…icle walks us through the complex and marvelously creative ways in which many Greeks avoid paying any taxes. Even real estate and sales taxes are eminently avoidable: leave the top floor of your house unfinished, and the home is not yet taxable; neglect to print out or submit sales receipts, and those sales are untaxed too. It was always a recipe for disaster: little in the way of reliable state income; staggering amounts of money borrowed on the…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…t was an already vulnerable population further into the shadows. Because many families have mixed immigrant statuses (some members are undocumented, some legal residents, and some U.S.-born citizens), sole reliance on enforcement often ends up hurting fellow citizens, as when the parents or siblings of the estimated three million children of undocumented immigrants born in this country are deported. There is, however, a deeper problem with the fra…

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

By Ed Simon

…nace Germans,” concluding that nothing ingested has been “found to induce anything resembling dancing mania.” Witnessing the Strasbourg pandemonium, and without better explanation, the German humanist Otto Brunfuls compared it to a variant of ancient Dionysian cults that would drunkenly rampage, remarking “What else is it but Korybantism … when, transported into delirium, they were led to dance in union without cease?” Anxieties of an uncertain er…

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

By Jonathan Malesic

…article notes that Reno is, in his words, “beginning to regret signaling any public support, as you can imagine.” Back in the middle of the fourth century, when there really was a Roman emperor, the bishop of Jerusalem was wary of the new alliance between Christianity and the empire. Concerned that many people were seeking to join the church just to get ahead in imperial society, Cyril, the bishop, instituted an elaborate process of Christian ini…