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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

…ce?” 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 be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…

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

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ols 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 unclear whether waste or outright theft by state employees is the greater drain on a hopelessly overburdened system. And then there are the pensions: all men who work in p…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…e in effect subsidized the expansion of the American economy through their cheap labor, the provisions in the bill allowing for a path to legalization were hard to defend. Into this vacuum come restrictionist voices that frame the issue in purely individualistic, ahistoric terms: hordes of immigrants are coming in, willfully breaking our laws, selfishly taking advantage of this country’s freedoms and resources. Here the word “illegal” becomes a ra…

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

By Ed Simon

…ic well-being of your fellow citizens? At a time when a disturbingly large number of people believe in the “QAnon” conspiracy; 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…

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

By Jonathan Malesic

…ued that American Christians were selling out their religious identity for cheap political gain, and that they could help ensure their religious integrity if they took that identity off the market altogether by concealing it in public life. This approach would take seriously Jesus’ advice to pray in secret and to give alms without letting “your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3-6). It also would follow an undercurrent in C…

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

By Michelle Goldberg

…aafa 21 quotes from a letter in which she wrote of the need for a “simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people. I believe that now, immediately there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.” These words are noxious, but it’s also important to put them…

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

By Sunnivie Brydum

…usly espoused this idea that contraceptives are so widely available and so cheap that the mandate was unnecessary. He said “all you have to do is walk into a 7-Eleven or any shop on any street in America and have access to them.” Opponents of the mandate have consistently belittled the idea that contraceptives are a significant health care cost for women despite the fact that, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, birth control comprises betw…

Must We Burn Something to Get Attention?: 50 Years After the Catonsville Nine

By Jason C. Bivins

…e Americans with disabilities being hauled off by Capitol cops, and to the numberless people standing against legal authority that suspects them for the crime of simply being black or Muslim or queer? If we think about Catonsville not just as a curiosity, a minor episode in the history of radical chic, but as a provocation or a template, what do we learn? Must Americans burn something to get attention? Must religious protesters be arrested? Many c…