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Trump’s Easter Egg Roll: Inauthentic Christianity in a Bunny Suit

By Karen E. Park

…with teaching, or welcoming, or even celebrating a Christian holiday (inappropriate as that itself would have been at a White House event). As this administration did with its craven and phony defense of “Merry Christmas” as if it were an endangered greeting, the Trump Administration has co-opted another holiday which has both deep theological meaning for believers and innocuous secular opportunities for community fellowship. For them Easter, eve…

Doubt v. Predator: A Vatican II Parable

By Gabriel Mckee

…simply whitewash. The real power structure—the hierarchy that continued to protect known predators for decades—is still in place. Sister Aloysius’s power within her domain is absolute, but the borders of that domain are unchanging. It’s tempting to view this story as a mystery—did Father Flynn abuse his student, or didn’t he?—but Shanley doesn’t want us to walk away with an answer. Father Flynn’s explanation is plausible enough, but his behavior i…

The Moral Bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Asceticism

By Vlad Chituc

…ll exist on the fringes? Rhinehart’s vision would have us invert the “haves” and the “have-nots,” letting the rich live lightly by offloading the messy business of consuming and owning to the poor. The solution to our problems isn’t to wildly deregulate and make transient consumption so cheap that the rich are no longer burdened by ownership. I don’t want to live the illusion of a simple life because I’m renting the frills….

The Birth of Un-Cool: How Disgusted Liberals Became Neoconservatives

By Michelle Goldberg

…s right has run its course. The friction was noticeable as far back as the primaries, when Republican elites recoiled from Mike Huckabee, and grew more widespread in the backlash to Sarah Palin. The aftermath of the election only exacerbated it. Shortly after Obama won, Kathleen Parker, a columnist who had once promoted the absurd canard of a secular “War on Christmas,” decided that “the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is…

Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse

By Peter Laarman

…ing to let a little thing like melting polar ice caps trouble us, are we? Spreading fear can also prompt another unhelpful reaction: what we might call the “fear junky” response in which we actually become attached to the fear and create a whole culture around it, as with the Godzilla cult that grew up in Japan in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see something like that today in the activities of radical environmentalists who don’t actually…

Watching Preachers’ Daughters Right After the Boston Bombings While Teaching a Class on Augustine’s Confessions

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…bstract. But. You know what? I just can’t, right now, mock the parents on Preachers’ Daughters for wanting to protect their children, not even if they do so using language and concepts that I disagree with. And I don’t really want to counter the reductive “purity” rhetoric with something reductive of my own, like a cheap criticism that Christianity is anti-sex and anti-body. Which brings me to Augustine’s Confessions, and specifically, reading Au…

From ‘Management Gurus’ to ‘Corporate Chaplains’: A Review of Spirituality Inc.

By Brittany Shoot

…ke “guru” in North American vernacular, but to gloss over these cultural appropriations, especially in the context of religious studies, seems inattentive. Covering Worker Exploitation with Religious Rhetoric Troubled by some of the book’s inconsistencies in coverage and Lambert’s omission of faith-based economic justice movements, I spoke with director of Interfaith Worker Justice (and Religion Dispatches contributor) Kim Bobo, who offered some t…

First Things First: Sexual Equality Just Is

By Kate Blanchard

…Saints no less than Augustine and Aquinas were clear that sex existed for procreation, with companionship (begrudgingly) as a secondary purpose. Following Jesus’ own path of virginity, however, was seen as the best life of all. Even when Protestant reformers emptied monasteries and convents, what they celebrated about marriage were friendship, parenthood, and sexual discipline; as Paul famously wrote, “it’s better to marry than to burn.” Apart fr…

Body Language: Michael Jackson and the Illogic of White Superiority

By Anthony B. Pinn

…ominant ideal. There is certainly something to the manner in which white supremacy shapes and represents through numerous outlets—television, magazines, etc.—the look of beauty, the aesthetic dimensions of worth and value. There is no doubt that Michael Jackson’s life and physical alterations speak to this destructive dimension of our socio-cultural world. As Michael Dyson noted, Michael Jackson displayed on and through his body the love/hate rela…

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

By Mati Wagner

…h exclusivity. David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish state’s first prime minister expressed this principle during a discussion in the Knesset on the 1950 Law of Return, which ensures automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew. “This law is the foundation of the State of Israel. It contains a central goal of our state, the goal of the ingathering of the exiled… this is not an immigration law, it is legislation that ensures continuity of Jewish history.” Admit…