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

…r the children of atheist lesbian couples are simply not welcome here. The cheap paperback Easter stories read by Sanders and Conway—no doubt ordered the day before from Amazon Prime—had nothing to do 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…

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Of Zionism and Anti-Zionism: The Ultra Orthodox and the Settler Movement in Israel

…e solution: develop Haredi communities in the territories where housing is cheap (through government subsidies), where they can maintain a lifestyle separate from secular Israel, and where their communities can continue to grow at an enormous rate. This is a particularly modern problem. The growth rate of the Haredi world is not solely the result of their big families. When you have a society that is essentially middle-class averaging seven childr…

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Four Reasons Why Egypt’s Revolution Is Islamic

…on-Muslims to support those ideals while transcending easy stereotypes and cheap fear-mongering. We should therefore pause in our reactions and ask ourselves; perhaps an Islamic revolution in Egypt is not de facto a bad thing.   Finally, I’m reminded of Karen Armstrong’s description of the historical mission Muslims are tasked with:  “In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical missio…

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Why Conservatives Really Oppose Federal Aid for the ‘Undeserving’

…y import, sacrilege, faith and ideology, which is faith’s steely cousin. A number of years ago, I was chatting with the theologian Walter Brueggemann’s then-wife Mary on a Sunday morning. She told me she’d been bemoaning some bit of racial egregiousness or another to her husband, and asked him why he thought people had to be this way. “There are two kinds of people in the world,” he replied. “Those who don’t see an order to the universe, and those…

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

…e country, teeming with teachers? What do America’s religions say to those Americans with disabilities being hauled off by Capitol cops, and to the numberless people standing against legal authority that suspects them for the crime of simply being black or Muslim or queer? If we think about Catonsville not just as a curiosity, a minor episode in the history of radical chic, but as a provocation or a template, what do we learn? Must Americans burn…

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The Social Science Animal: Brooks Argues for Emotion over Reason

…themselves as upper-middle class individuals in a cutthroat and careerist American society, eventually becoming CEOs (of a cable company), presidential campaign organizers, or think tank operatives (who write articles that sound as if they quote, primarily, from Brooks’ Times column). But instead of inspiring figures of human potential, they come off more as cheap foils that Brooks is using to market his theories to the wealthy, literate class of…

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SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

…orms of penance helped inspire the Reformation in Europe. The landscape of American religion is often conceived of as a market in which churches and denominations compete for worshippers. Sales tactics influence evangelists, and companies use religion to push political agendas. Nevertheless, there’s an anti-commercial texture to spiritual life, even in the United States. Mosques, churches, synagogues, and temples are nonprofits. Even Joel Osteen’s…

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RDBook: Apocalypse Without God

…and during the 1980s he helped to bring the ideas of Jacques Derrida into American theology and religious studies. Starting in the late 90s, though, Taylor ventured far afield with books on architecture, computer networks, economic markets, and even Las Vegas. In 2006, he released a book of photographs of animal skeletons in the desert. Taylor’s most recent book, After God, gathers these pieces together into a wide-ranging manifesto. He insists t…

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Lindsey Graham’s Lying “Eye-ranians”

…Word told me, and Microsoft Word is a real American, because Bill Gates is American. Those of you using iPhones, by the way, are probably Iranians and should be detained or deported. Because Steve Jobs was part Syrian, and Syria is part Iranian, which means your iPhone auto-correct is lying to you. Come to think of it, how do we know Lindsey Graham is not lying to us? How do we know Lindsey Graham’s not an Iranian? What if he’s the Manchurian—or s…

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Noah v. Kitschy Jesus: A Tale of Two Movies

…an’t quite pinpoint what all of these had in common, except that they were cheap, over-simplified, and kitschy. And thanks to Walter Benjamin, Clement Greenberg, the Frankfurt School, and a legion of writers and musicians allergic to the cliché, I came to reject kitsch and its quasi-fascistic associations. Feel this way, think this way, act this way—no! It took another several years before I really understood that some people, perhaps most people,…

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