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Common Ground: Winning the Battle, Losing the Culture War

By Chip Berlet

…hat the swing voters are culled from the large of group of white moderately- to mildly-conservative evangelicals who respond to clearly-articulated policy positions by Democratic candidates. What are these concerns? Primarily it is the economy; but also poverty, war, corruption, the environment, education, health care, and more. Green and colleague Geoffrey C. Layman concluded after a major study of voting demographics: “The cultural wars are wage…

How an 1843 Revelation on Polygamy Poses a Serious Challenge to Modern Mormonism

By Benjamin E. Park

…rum, still convinced that he was the one who could finally reach his sister-in-law, then rushed the text, ink still wet, over to Emma’s home, armed with what he believed were infallible truths. The mission failed. When Hyrum returned, he reported that he had received the sternest rebuke of his life. The next day, after he had already made a copy of the text, Joseph allowed Emma to destroy the document that symbolized, for her, so much pain. Circum…

Under Water: Waiting for the Flood (of Awareness) in Louisiana

By Drew Konow

…g these critiques, some have contrasted the coverage of the flood with wall-to-wall coverage of the Olympics, the ongoing presidential sideshow, and the riots in Milwaukee. Having your suffering ignored or cast aside only intensifies the pain you feel. And, yet, comparing one’s suffering with the suffering of others, calculating them according to hierarchies of pain, reinforces the logic of oppression. In other words, the standards that determine…

Oprah, Terrorist Cells, and the Meaning of Life: An Interview with Paul Froese

By Andrew Aghapour

…photo albums and take mental snapshots of our aging parents, forming a past-and-future flip book of our own aging bodies. We get scared. We tell old stories and overeat. New Year’s resolutions are what happen when bloated Americans go back to their lives, and then pivot optimistic in the face of death. On Purpose: How We Create The Meaning of Life Paul Froese Oxford University Press (January 6, 2016) I participate in this tradition. Every January,…

Joyless Primaries Grind On

By Joanna Brooks

…Because that’s what he does. Like it or not. That joyless put-your-shoulder-to-the-wheel tenacity is setting the tone for the GOP primaries. Onward grinds the contest, protracted unnaturally by super PAC money, and delivering few surprises: Romney continues to win the Northeast and West, Santorum the Bible Belt. Ohio turned out just about the way the best prognosticators in the game predicted. There’s been nothing so dramatic to punch up the story…

Not All American Muslims Feel the Dread I Do

By Huma Mohibullah

…he was as a candidate. Others live with a sense of impending doom. The anti-Clinton activists welcome this outcome as a much-needed awakening that will finally mobilize Muslims to forcefully resist the bipartisan establishment. How Muslims and other US minorities will handle the coming damage remains to be seen. What is abundantly clear is that Islamophobia is now validated like never before. While it has long had a place in bipartisan politics an…

The Banality of Bernie

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…estruction all had a home. These were homes to massive bureaucracies, micro-managed by men with photographic memories who could describe, on the phone at long distance, where a file was located, and what page in that file needed scanning. There was obsessive record-keeping, coupled with a mastery of spin. (Squillari suggests that Madoff planted several pieces of evidence in his office in order to be arrested on his own timetable and on his own ter…

These Are the New Battlegrounds for LGBT Rights Under Trump

By Sunnivie Brydum

…t of the Affordable Care Act, and is expected to be a key figure in the yet-to-be-announced plan to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. And Price is no friend to the gays. According to LGBT media watchdog GLAAD’s “Trump Accountability Project,” the Georgia Republican scored a zero (out of 100) on the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Equality Scorecard, voted against repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and in favor of amending the Constitution to b…

Religion at Decade’s End

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…mplies for the way we think about, and talk about, religion today… as a not-so-new century readies the celebrations for its ten-year-old birthday. Religion is back…again The tempting place to begin is with what has almost become a twenty-first century truism: that in this new century, religion was decidedly “back.” Just one year into this new century, religion of a certain sort literally exploded across the brainscape of a wondering and worried w…

Mother (Nature) Will Eat You: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…backs and intercuts reminiscent of a Bill Viola video; high-contrast, black-and-white lovemaking; textured, hypnotic, surrealistic scenes of humans intertwined with nature; and extreme close-ups of human eyes, bamboo in a glass vase, and unkempt hair (the camera sporadically zooms in on the backs of heads a la Hitchcock’s Vertigo) all make for a film that is impossible to get out of one’s sensual body. Antichrist’s images and sounds have infiltrat…