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Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…craft engaging narratives. In sum, those of us sitting comfortably in our cheap desk chairs in our sterile offices in the nation’s colleges and universities have no higher ground to stand on. While we all labor to maintain an appropriate level of nuance, complexity, and context in our work, there is no doubt that we could write bigger books and assign our students more reading to gain deeper contextualization and fit more people and more themes a…

Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…—no less than us, we eavesdroppers outside the confessional—must labor to fill in the salacious 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. Penanc…

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

…dly, 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 forms and cost as little as $10 at big-box retailers. But many newer kinds aren’t and cost upwards of $40 month. Women need to use the form of oral contraceptive, or contraception in general, that best suits their personal and medical needs, not what happens to be on the…

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

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…se into the current state of the Greek economy. Those Greek citizens (who will be asked to foot the bill and to pay the cost of the austerity measures currently being imposed upon Greece by moralizing Germans and nervous French) are now calling for the heads of the Vatopaidi monastery as well. Father Arsenios’s way of deflecting the criticism is fascinating, if puzzling. “The Greek newspapers, they call us a corporation,” he observes. “But I ask…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…g 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 framing of the issue employing terms like “illegal.” The label “illegal” is factually correct, insofar as it accurately describes the actions of many immigrants who have violated US immigration laws, either by crossing the border unauthorized or oversta…

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

By Ed Simon

…d convincing than any other … It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine,” while remembering that the transcendent has origins in directions both above and below. Strasbourg appears as a fairy tale, there is the whiff of allegory about their revels, but the dance plague is neither fairy tale nor allegory—it actually happened. If we’re to derive any symbolic significance from the few hundred peasants who literal…

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

By Jonathan Malesic

…onsibility for things she has no control over, but still claims that “God will not hold us guiltless” if Christians allow her to become president. Never mind the apocalypse a President Trump would unleash. Reno and Metaxas are supposedly among the best minds on the Christian Right. But their arguments for Trump are neither conservative, Christian, nor intellectual. They aren’t even patriotic, given that both Reno and Metaxas seem fine with allowin…

Anti-Choice Doc Aims to Link Reproductive Rights to ‘Black Genocide’

By Michelle Goldberg

…” who he called “the finest type of people” needed to have at least four children per family to avoid “extinction.” Maafa 21 includes ugly quotes from the eugenicist Charles Davenport, but doesn’t mention that he opposed birth control. Later, we see an image of Hitler and the words “Natural Allies.” Naturally, the movie doesn’t mention that, upon gaining power, Hitler, eager for more German babies, moved quickly against legal abortion and birth co…

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

By Sunnivie Brydum

…ink this this assumption—that anyone who wants birth control can get it easily—will affect already marginalized groups, including young, low-income, undocumented, and LGBTQ people? AL: As I’ve written before on RD here and here, marginalized groups, particularly low-income, non-binary women of color are disproportionately affected by birth control restrictions. These are society’s most vulnerable groups, and they are the ones least afforded the ri…