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

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…your chances of winning—and you should. This country is basically a center-right to center-left country and if we could rotate a competent center-right with a competent-center left person then I think we’d have a healthy country. I think your book could help people make a critical assessment of how religion is being used in politics because if they understood the Bible then they would recognize when it’s being misused and abused. It seems to me…

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

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…in the Appalachian Mountains, which has experienced tough times as its coal-based economy has collapsed. Into this post-industrial marginal space, immigrants, oftentimes fleeing economic dislocation and political upheaval in Latin America, have come to work in agriculture and the emerging new factories. This sudden influx has fueled tensions with a native population that has not seen significant immigration since the turn of the 20th century. The…

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

Well, it’s over. Last week the six-hour, multi-million-dollar Frontline/American Experience production God in America aired on PBS. Now the debate over its merits begins. Reviews from journalists have been mostly positive, although New York Times television critic Mike Hale was not totally impressed. The show, he wrote, was “stuffed with facts and dates and figures” and sometimes strained “to find a way to tie them together.” He also called it “a…

Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…lacious details. Was that the confession of a seventeen-year-old or a fifty-year-old? The age of consent leaves no obvious trace on our twitter-voices. And did the sin really happen at all? Maybe the prurient pleasure was not with any sophomore, but with us; a dirty joke traded against misplaced credulity. All we know is that both penances were accepted. Penance, an application released for the iPhone in early December, allows users to absolve one…

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

By Peter Laarman

…ation but also appears at times to admire Pecksniff’s immense skill in self-justification and 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…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…irth control, which is inexpensive? Now, first of all, I don’t know which 7-11 the cardinal frequents, but other than condoms they don’t sell birth control (although a “six-pack and emergency contraception special” might cut down on a lot of unplanned pregnancies). Secondly, the Catholic bishops collapse all types of contraception into two “easily” available forms: birth control pills and condoms. Some oral contraceptives are available in generic…

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

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…n declared Greece to be the European front in the new Cold War, and a three-year civil war, from 1946-1949, further decimated the country. The country opted for tourism in the 1960s, arguably the least “trickle-down” of all economic forms, and thus made itself further dependent upon and vulnerable to European whims. The U.S.-supported military junta was not expelled until 1974. And so on.) How to Sue a Monastery Into that atmosphere—one part boom…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…l, therefore, sets an absolutist dichotomy that leaves no room for the give-and-take that is at the heart of deliberative democracy. It is here that churches can contribute to the debate. As de Tocqueville observed, by generating spaces of social engagement and dissent, religious congregations have been central to the development of a robust civil society in the United States. This has been particularly the case for sectors of society that have be…

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

By Ed Simon

…spiracy; when “pizzagate” inspired a gunman to raid a pizzeria; where “flat-Earthers” have a growing fan-base; or where people ingest Tide Pods; can we really argue that these aren’t as foolish a bit of mass hysteria as dancing oneself to death? Scottish journalist Charles Mackay contends in his 1841 classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, that during times of social disarray we “find that whole communities … become sim…

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

By Jonathan Malesic

…ollowing the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision, which legalized same-sex marriage across the country, the conservative magazine National Review published an essay by the talk-show host (and Trump supporter) Dennis Prager headlined, “The Court Follows Its Heart and Completes the Secularization of America.” Completes the secularization of America? That was fast. The men who lead the Christian Right seem to have a poor sense of history and pol…