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Defying Gravity Defies Sci-Fi Conventions

By Gabriel Mckee

…argates here— just chemical rockets, spacesuits, and lots of calls back to Houston. There’s even a (only slightly unsatisfying) explanation for why everybody sticks to the floor instead of floating around the ship. Any show that takes itself — and the “science” half of SF — so seriously is faced with an uphill battle. The show is the brainchild of Grey’s Anatomy writer James Parriott, and its focus is precisely on how our very human natures play o…

Christian Punk Meets American Pop; Evangelicals in the ’Burbs

By Brittany Shoot

…or having a child out of wedlock in a speech to the Commonwealth Club). In Houston, Pat Buchanan gave a primetime speech in which he declared a “cultural war” for the “soul of America.” I was appalled by the speech, but I had siblings who thought it was great. So my initial interest in the topic was that “family values” could provoke vastly different reactions—I found it exclusive, but others found it inclusive. A few years later, I went to gradua…

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…

Layoffs on the Religious Right

By Bill Berkowitz

…nted out that Hunter, along with Dallas Pentecostal megapastor T.D. Jakes, Houston Methodist minister (and George Bush favorite) Kirbyjon Caldwell and Otis Moss II, the retired pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, participated in a telephone prayer session with Obama several hours before he was declared the winner. Hunter, who came to the media’s attention in 2006 when an arrangement for him to take over as head of the Chris…

“The Call” Warns of Antichrist Legislation in California and Beyond

By Sarah Posner

…nual prayer.” James Antoine, a 36-year-old Wal-Mart pharmacy employee from Houston, told me he spent a week at the Kansas City IHOP, where young people pray around the clock, which he called “powerful and life-changing.” (Antoine, who is African American, would not tell me who he was voting for but said he could not vote for a candidate who favored abortion rights.) IHOP “stirs young people,” Antoine told me, and “keeps them continuously alert abo…

In Convention Event Democrats Embrace the ‘Nones’

By Chrissy Stroop

…ds, Chair of the Black Humanist Alliance and founder of Black Lives Matter Houston; Dr. Monica Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University; and Robert P. Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the newly released White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. Miller noted that “we tend to separate out whiteness from its religion of Christianity, and the o…

Chick-fil-A Means “Anti-gay”?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…olvement.” The chain was even sued in 2002 by a Muslim restaurant owner in Houston “who said he was fired because he did not pray to Jesus with other employees at a training session. The suit was settled.” The company also runs WinShape Foundation that promotes “traditional” marriage as well as a retreat center near Rome, Georgia. Gays and lesbians looking for a retreat should look elsewhere, however. In an email exchange with one gay blog, the re…

“Living in Favor, Abundance, and Joy” (Unless You’re Gay)

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ard time taking his own advice to interviews. When he’s up on stage at his Houston megachurch, it’s all joy and abundance and, well, betterness. But when he’s on the other end of the microphone, being asked questions about homosexuality, you can see the discomfort wash over him. The ladies on The View cornered him on the subject back in 2009, and his evasive answer was that homosexuality was not “God’s best” for such people. He retreated to the ti…

A Philosopher of Religion Calls it Quits

By Julia Galef

…otice. After a decade teaching philosophy of religion at the University of Houston, during which time he founded the philosophy of religion journal Philo and published over twenty books and articles in the field, Parsons hung up his hat on September 1: I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I coul…

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…