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Pox Americana: Franzen’s Tragic Vision

By Peter Laarman

…with the Nature Conservancy to become a DC-based environmental shill for a Houston oil and gas player (and Bush family friend) named Vincent Haven (Franzen’s use of surnames is consistently arch in a way that Dickens would appreciate). With the help of his nubile young Indian-American assistant, Walter becomes complicit in Haven’s scheme to save a big chunk of West Virginia habitat for the endangered cerulean warbler. He continues even after learn…

Taking the Economy Back From the Elites: Blessed Are the Organized

By Nathan Schneider

…of 2007, I led another seminar for IAF organizers and leaders, this one in Houston, and again went out into various communities to see what contemporary grassroots democracy looks like on the ground. The most important stops on that trip were in New Orleans, 16 months after Katrina, and in the Rio Grande Valley, where I accompanied a team of experienced organizers on a tour of the region where the shantytowns along the Mexican border had been orga…

You’re Worse When You’re Hiding The Cocaine: A Moral Psychologist on Character and Blame

By Vlad Chituc

…bad person. Along with Tamler Sommers, a philosopher at the University of Houston, Pizarro hosts “Very Bad Wizards,” a podcast on ethics and cognitive science that includes an impressive array of guests—from Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and atheist polemicist, to Paul Bloom, a moral psychologist, to Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist and scholar of irrationality. (Disclosure: Dan Ariely is my boss, and I got to be friends with Pizarro while he sp…

A Pair of Christian Colleges Quietly Cracking Down on LGBTQ Acceptance

By Chrissy Stroop

…buse scandal in the Southern Baptist Convention, recently uncovered by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, we should pause to take stock of the culpability of the broader conservative, mostly white evangelical subculture—not just churches in other evangelical denominations, but also educational institutions, parachurch ministries, parallel information and entertainment industries, and political lobbying organizations. As I have arg…

Inevitable Megachurch Abuse of PPP Funds is Coming to Light — Private Jet Included

By Andrew L. Seidel

…ow sooner if journalists start digging. Chris Mathews, a reporter from the Houston Business Journal, broke the Osteen story. Lisa Guerrero of Inside Edition has been digging too, and she discovered a private jet likely financed with PPP money. Marcus Lamb runs Daystar Television, which may have as many as 2 billion viewers and is valued at a quarter of a billion dollars. Two weeks after it took $4 million in taxpayer PPP funds, it bought a private…

Polygamy Bus Tour, ‘Spiritual’ Healthcare for Christian Scientists, Baptizing an Alien…

By Michael J. Altman

…about these guys as neighbors, what kind of neighbors would they want?” In Houston, a mosque and a Unitarian Universalist church have become great neighbors. In Russia, witches, wizards, and faith healers face a ban on advertising their healing expertise. Authorities also want to require licenses to practice alternative medicine and would not license witches or wizards. Christian Scientists in the U.S., meanwhile, are asking for health insurance t…

But What Did We Learn? Hate-Watching the First Clinton/Trump Debate

By Candace E. West

…awful two-year-olds throwing a tantrum….And yes, you can quote me.” LP in Houston wanted to “figure out what Trump voters see,” but also hoped Trump might say something to “destroy his campaign.” I told her I wasn’t sure there was anything he could say to accomplish that, given the things he’s already said (she hoped maybe he’d lose younger, undecided voters by saying he’d “jack up student loan rates or burn down Urban Outfitters or something.”)…

Violence of the Lambs: The Legacy of Anti-Choice Extremist Father Norman Weslin

By Kathryn Joyce

…DC bio, and does not seem to have eulogized Weslin.) Twenty years later, a number of Weslin’s Atlanta cohort—like Shannon, Dinwiddie and Bray—would become chief supporters of Scott Roeder, the Operation Rescue follower who shot Dr. Tiller at his church in 2009. The 1988 arrestees were housed separately for 40 days, resulting in the creation of an ad-hoc movement school that the prisoners compared to the civil rights schools of Birmingham jails in…

Bullies Flourishing with Christian Support

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…lton Middle School in the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District in Houston Texas. Brown, his family said, was “bullied to death” – picked on for his small size, his religion and because he did not wear designer clothes and shoes. Kids also accused him of being gay, some of them performing mock gay acts on him in his physical education class, his mother and stepfather said. • Billy (William) Lucas, 15, a student at Greensburg Community High…

Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates: The Problem with Popularization

By Kathryn Lofton

…mentioning Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ and pretending Whitney Houston doesn’t exist.” And “threatening to take away a Puritan magistrate’s right to punish is like yanking the trumpet out of Louis Armstrong’s hands.” Historians reading this may need to reach for the Pepto-Bismol. Magistrates and musicians? John Cotton and Nelson Mandela? The Puritans and Mick Jagger? Metaphor’s pleasure requires a suspension of analogical responsibilit…