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

By Peter Laarman

…had a good whiff of Mr. Pecksniff about him—Seth Pecksniff being Dickens’ most perfectly realized poseur and hypocrite. Pecksniff’s machinations drive the plot of Martin Chuzzlewit, which Dickens himself considered to be his best novel (most critics demur). This long picaresque work, serialized in 1843 and 1844, is savagely satirical as nothing else in the Dickens ouvre. Mr. Pecksniff is introduced early on as a fundamentally crooked person, rott…

Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…the Cardinal of Canada replies, “Okay, I forgive me.” Online anonymity is most frequently associated with the cruelty of masked trolls, seduction by gender dissimulators, and financial scams. We forget too easily that online facelessness also facilitates the sacred possibilities of the masked ritual, the voting booth, and the therapist’s couch. From their first moments, online spaces have mingled the privacy of the truck stop bathroom wall and th…

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…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 “an unusually serious and, to use a word the producers would probably rather not see, intellectual endeavor for television, one that d…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…rt case as inspiring examples of American religious conviction and told guest host Norah O’Donnell that cutting contraception out of insurance policies wasn’t a problem: Is the ability to buy contraceptives, that are now widely 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 suffoca…

National Association of Evangelicals Supports Immigration Reform, But Elsewhere Discord Reigns

By Donna Schaper

…cribed ‘compassion’ among religious elites differs from the perspective of most rank-and-file Christians.” And he names the National Association of Evangelicals in particular, knowing that they were on the verge of making the statement they made today, suggesting that their position on this issue is counter to that of the laity, which “generally opposes legalization and supports enforcement of immigration laws.” Steinlight agreed, arguing that “in…

Turn on the News: Some Abortion Opponents May Opt For a New Vaccine, But Behind Their Skepticism it’s Often a Different Story — of Disinformation, Conspiratorial Thinking, and White Nationalism

By Daniel Schultz

…cation, and that “more” might be helping to feed the energy of some of the most disturbing actors in contemporary politics. All of this is definitely worth drawing out. More generally, I think there’s an ongoing need for journalists to take conspiratorial mindsets seriously when reporting on religion. That’s not a criticism of Jenkins—hardly any reporters engage this difficult terrain. Conspiracy thinking and faith aren’t necessarily identical, or…

Holding Out for a Hero: New ID Book Aims to Save You From Despair of Evolution

By Kriti Sharma

…correctly, and the consequences are terrible to imagine: Contemplate for just a moment the dystopian vision of a generation of human beings believing in their hearts that they are nothing more than bestial accidents fending for themselves in a world where morality is a fiction, and you begin to grasp the true stakes. When I’m giving a Bio 101 lecture on the evolutionary divergence between clams and snails, it does not occur to me that so much is o…

Israel’s Immigration Debate: “Where is the Jewish Spirit?”

By Mati Wagner

…ks. And they came, creating in the process a mosaic of cultural diversity. Most of Israel’s foreign workers (30 percent) came from Thailand but many migrated from the Philippines (18%), and from China (10%), Nepal (6%) and Romania (5%). They were willing to work harder than the average Israeli for longer hours at a lower salary (40% lower on average according to the Bank of Israel). Many stayed on after their permits expired to defray the initial…

Dispatches from the Election: Around the Moon, Safely

By Glenn W. Smith

…talking heads achieve neither awe nor humility. There are exceptions, but most are captured and made insecure by a cruel and irresponsible corporate media bazaar that demands fealty to its barons and their political allies. They are carnival barkers who won’t shut up. For those too young to remember that first manned mission to the Moon, those 30-plus seconds of silence seemed like a message from God that reinforced the hopes of those years, hope…

Playing Hooky: Will Boycott of Catholic Church Spur Reform?

By Nathan Schneider

…cause. If all the women left, I know my church would be pretty empty—it’s most of the way there already. It’ll be just me and probably one other guy carrying the hymns, and that isn’t a good thing. But is it bad enough to make the collars in Rome reconsider their position? The truth is, I’m tempted to join her. I don’t know exactly how far I’d go on celibacy and women’s ordination, but I do know that on both the time for meaningful reconsideratio…