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Can a Greek Monastery Be Ground Zero of Global Financial Meltdown?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…s. Even real estate and sales taxes are eminently avoidable: leave the top floor of your house unfinished, and the home is not yet taxable; neglect to print out or submit sales receipts, and those sales are untaxed too. It was always a recipe for disaster: little in the way of reliable state income; staggering amounts of money borrowed on the cheap to make up the margins; and books consistently cooked to hide the scale of the national debt. (The…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: “They Came at Night, Trying to Kill Us!”

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…ollapsed. Into this post-industrial marginal space, immigrants, oftentimes fleeing economic dislocation and political upheaval in Latin America, have come to work in agriculture and the emerging new factories. This sudden influx has fueled tensions with a native population that has not seen significant immigration since the turn of the 20th century. The reasons behind the killing in Shenandoah are complex. Nevertheless, Gladys Limón, a staff lawye…

The Problem with Christian Gentlemen: A Short Goodbye to Ted Cruz, the “Mr. Pecksniff” of Presidential Politics

By Peter Laarman

…z, like Mr. Seth Pecksniff, maintains the utmost horror toward sins of the flesh and the utmost contempt for fleshly sinners like Trump. Any hint of outward disloyalty or dishonesty likewise gives them the greatest alarm. But the very notion that there could be much more grievous sins of the spirit seems never to have occurred to either of them. I don’t know or care whether Ted Cruz has cheated on his wife. My guess is that he has not. But the mis…

The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ictim he could denigrate. He united all the Germans against the Jews. It’s cheap politics, but we still have people who know how to do that. It doesn’t lead to anything but destruction. How can reeducating ourselves about the Bible—and educating the non-religious about the Bible—help us regain the center? One of my hopes for this book is that it will provide a textbook to talk about the Bible in a new way. A local pastor doesn’t have to actually s…

Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…ially-networked religion like Prayer Wall or Manistone facilitate shared reflection on sacred realities beyond the crowds they attract, Penance draws instead upon the growing faith that social networking can miraculously generate spiritual orientation, evading with sacrilegious humor where one expects guidance. Behold: crowdsourced Catholicism. Such a system demands a temporal rather than eternal perspective. On December 20th, I registered for the…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…lars to explore how congregations in Atlanta are responding to the rapid influx of Latino immigrants, many of whom are undocumented. In the future, I will be reporting from these zones of encounter, on the promises, conflicts, and obstacles that emerge. While our study is still in its early stages, we have found some congregations that are effectively “borderlands” where the question of who gets to belong to the “beloved community” is asked with i…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…ce?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…

Can I Get Some Birth Control Pills With That Slushie?: Unpacking the Contraceptive Mandate Rollback

By Sunnivie Brydum

…usly espoused this idea that contraceptives are so widely available and so cheap that the mandate was unnecessary. He said “all you have to do is walk into a 7-Eleven or any shop on any street in America and have access to them.” Opponents of the mandate have consistently belittled the idea that contraceptives are a significant health care cost for women despite the fact that, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, birth control comprises betw…

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

By Jason C. Bivins

…olic in its goals and orientations. But while those protests multiplied in number, and continue still, they were drowned out by the hosannas of Ronald Reagan’s America™. If burning children are the price paid for our stock portfolios or geopolitical advantage, well, just keep smiling, America. The whole world is now the land of burning children. So, too, has America’s never-ending war (who are we fighting now, again?) marched on. There is fire in…

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…craft engaging narratives. In sum, those of us sitting comfortably in our cheap desk chairs in our sterile offices in the nation’s colleges and universities have no higher ground to stand on. While we all labor to maintain an appropriate level of nuance, complexity, and context in our work, there is no doubt that we could write bigger books and assign our students more reading to gain deeper contextualization and fit more people and more themes a…