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Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse

By Peter Laarman

…pocalyptic fear cuts both ways. It can spur some palliative action, but it can also cause people to cling to false hopes and delusions and shut down their capacity for creative responses. Such people think: We’ve gone almost seven decades without destroying the earth in a thermonuclear holocaust—surely we’re not going to let a little thing like melting polar ice caps trouble us, are we? Spreading fear can also prompt another unhelpful reaction: wh…

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

By Peter Laarman

…t 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 one han…

Doubt v. Predator: A Vatican II Parable

By Gabriel Mckee

…m Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle Joe Versus the Volcano addresses many of the American Catholic Church’s gravest concerns of the last 50 years; most obviously the abuse scandals, but also the shrinking priesthood, the changing role of women, the civil rights movement, and the cross-pollination of secular and religious cultures. Set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964 (taken from Shanley’s own childhood experience), the school’s principal, Sister Aloysius (…

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…ative Americans in Puritan New England to the impact of Vatican II on American Catholics to Orthodox faiths to new religious movements. In fact, I was even tipped off before the series aired that the subject of my first book—Aimee Semple McPherson—did not make the cut. A television travesty if there ever was one! I am encouraged, though, that so many academics tuned in to PBS and that the series has provoked such a vigorous debate. Nevertheless, I…

Playing Hooky: Will Boycott of Catholic Church Spur Reform?

By Nathan Schneider

…k. What I’m proposing is a struggle, but a necessary one. But their significance can be exaggerated. When progressives leave their counterparts shape the Church more and more as they like it. Some have tried forming alternative Catholic communities, groups that celebrate their own masses in living rooms and rented halls, sometimes even ordaining their own priests. In the most extreme cases, the result has been marginalization and excommunication….

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

By Mati Wagner

…on deteriorated with the beginning of the second intifada in fall 2000 and cheap Palestinian labor became increasingly inaccessible due to curfews and roadblocks designed to prevent terrorist attacks. 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…

Why Taxing the Rich is the Godly Thing

By Peter Laarman

…e that this is how savage inequality maintains its vampirish lease on American life: by replicating itself within the bloodstream of elites and would-be elites. But the full weight of religious testimony argues that it only compounds the injuries of a massive injustice to remain silent—that the only way forward is by breaking open the pretenses and presumptions of the powerful. Sin takes many forms. Sometimes sin arises from failing to know the…

Build the Muslim Community Center at Ground Zero

By Donna Schaper

…. Religious institutions need signs and symbols. Forgiveness doesn’t happen all at once. But it could begin with a building permit at Ground Zero. Finally, that word love, which so many wrongly imagine as a soft verb. There is nothing soft about love. It is the most dangerous action in the world. Because we can’t love, because most of us do know the risks, we stay pre-love and permanently protected. Our armor forgets how to come off. We imagine ou…

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

By Donna Schaper

…s for years, if ever, they are valuable to that (other) broken system. You can call an economic-engine program to provide a path to citizenship “amnesty,” and you can even sneer at that word. But before we lose that word to television commentators, we might want to take a good look at the loss. Amnesty means forgiveness. Often people of faith believe in forgiveness. What is the sin to be forgiven? Not that of the people who cross borders to wait o…

The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

By Frederick Clarkson

…utlining eliminationism in American history, from Native Americans and African Americans, through Chinese and Japanese immigrants and more. He shows how eliminationist rhetoric was often followed by “an actual campaign of violent eliminationism.” This history is presented with a note of urgency, because the eliminationist rhetoric as currently featured by elements of the conservative movement, “is in many ways,” he stresses, “the signature feature…