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A Shining City: The Occupy Movement and the American Soul

By Elizabeth Drescher

…n, and G. W. Bush administrations) surely dimmed the lights on that dream, prompting, these last few weeks, protestors around the country to amend the beatific vision much as the later gospel writer, Luke (6:24-26), felt called to do: But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when everyone speaks…

Why Conservatives Really Oppose Federal Aid for the ‘Undeserving’

By Daniel Schultz

…servative ideology behind the senators’ performative opposition: That interpretation is this: The rich can be trusted with public money, but not so everyone else. It’s OK to give Boeing tens of billions of dollars in relief aid. It’s OK to give corporations access to unlimited and cheap money from the Federal Reserve. But it’s not OK to give normal people an extra $600 a week, people who are at the same time being coaxed by billionaires into going…

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

By Jason C. Bivins

…eage of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers. As the cameras rolled on the protest, Daniel prayed, too, to the God of peace in whose name they undertook the action. But as the Catonsville Nine reached into the ashes and made crosses on their brows—the Lenten sign of repentance for the sacrifice of the innocent and of the Church’s belief that fire purifies as well as punishes—the protest became a remarkably specific articulation of Catholicism’s em…

SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

By Michael Schulson

…oulCycle looks like a prosperity gospel church for secular coastal elites. Preachers in the prosperity gospel tradition get a lot of flak for being exploitative, for being dishonest, and for making a lot of money. But I suspect that our deepest discomfort comes from their naked appeals to the perfect coherence of capitalist success and personal salvation. These appeals come through a relentless emphasis on individual improvement and positive think…

‘People You May Know’ Reveals a War on Democracy Being Waged With Big Data

By Chrissy Stroop

…ing culture-warring churches, I do consider the evangelism aspect of these programs predatory. But I also see that there aren’t a lot of alternatives for most people. CK: You can see that this happens in other functions of life too. Joining a church in a new town is the way to get quickly integrated into the community. It’s comparable to the role of the village pub in the UK. There’s a story that just broke in the past week. We have a track-and-tr…

Pop-Eye: Meat The Wrestler

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…meets the deli counter: the wrestler as meat meets meat. You can read, and probably already have, the reviews praising Rourke’s performance; how the film parallels Rourke’s own life as an actor; how his performance should get him close to an Oscar. I leave the heaping of kudos to others. I want to get to the heart of the matter, exploring the religious connotations of meat, and why so many critics left the obvious religious references aside, inclu…

RDBook: Apocalypse Without God

By Nathan Schneider

…d the significance of new technologies. I think the reason for that is the Protestant preoccupation with the Word, and they get the Word out however they can. For a long time it was print. In the early 20th century it was radio. By the forties it was television. Both continue, of course. Now, among conservative Protestants, it is very sophisticated uses of internet and video media. Again, there’s that whole trajectory that begins with Luther and c…

Lindsey Graham’s Lying “Eye-ranians”

By Haroon Moghul

…nt whose name shall not be spoken, sell that lie-dar back to us at bargain prices and use his profits to build a Super PAC to make sure you, I, and everyone here, are focused not on wage gaps but Iranian liars? For lie they do. But how much? When crowds gather to chant ‘Death to America,’ do they really mean ‘Live Long and Prosper’? If so, was Spock a jihadist? Should we interrogate Zachary Quinto? When some Iranian leaders suggest Israel has no p…

Noah v. Kitschy Jesus: A Tale of Two Movies

By Jay Michaelson

…aditions which resist oversimplification. Son of God and Noah don’t just represent two different ways to read Scripture, two different ways to make films, and two different marketing demographics. They also represent two sharply different ways to believe, to be in the world: one inspired by the pure and the simple, another suspicious, if not contemptuous, of them. These different modes of relation to complexity include politics, art, taste, style,…

Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Avatar and the Myth of Originality

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…e viewers to respond, to make meaning out of a mashup. The process of reappropriation does not make any of it lesser art; for it is precisely the mixing and merging of influences that interfaces with a larger tradition, knows where it comes from, where it is, and where it is going. The writers of Genesis borrowed from Babylonian and other Ancient Near-East stories of the creation of the cosmos, reusing it for their own emerging monotheistic socie…