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Red Riding Hood Arouses Man’s Inner (Were)Wolf

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…n Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic, rather than a Greco-Roman, myth. And what is most striking about these “werewolves” is that they are even more wolf-like than the wolves are. More predatory, more violent, more dangerous. There’s some confusion about the etymology of ‘were-wolf’ which appears to derive from the linkage of the words for “man” (vir) and wolf. But we hear a vague echo of “true” (wahr) in the name as well. The werewolf as a man-wolf. The we…

The Rise and Fall of an American Gang: Religion as Camouflage?

By Spencer Dew

…hey note “wasn’t actually involved in a street gang,” as someone who was just “boasting” rather than plotting. The thrust here seems to be that, like the “candy corn-colored system that rates the levels of terrorism threats against the Unites States” which the authors deride, the case against Batiste and his accomplices is a case of overzealous policing (“all done in the name of homeland security”) rather than a legitimate response to a real dang…

Mr. President, Your Papers Please: The Birther Inquisition

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…He now intends to take a longer look at that card. He asks the man he has stopped to step out of his car, and to accompany him to his own vehicle, so that he can get on his computer and do a more thorough background check. The dirty secret of all such stops is that once you are in the system, it is very hard to get out. There is always one more document or fact to check. It is investigation that simply breeds more investigation, world without end…

This is not a Religion Column: Biblical Capitalism

By Jeff Sharlet

…chman, the founder of the Moral Re-Armament movement—a network of upper crust Christian clubs—announced, “Human problems aren’t economic. They’re moral, and they can’t be solved by immoral measures.” He suggested instead “God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy.” Bruce Barton, a founder of advertising giant BBDO and the author of one of the 20th century’s bestsellers, The Man Nobody Knows (it was Jesus, whom Barton proposed a…

The Heresy of End Times Predictions

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…d than they are to orthodoxy. The reason for that takes us to the second most striking thing about nineteenth and twentieth century apocalyptic thought (and yes, now twenty-first century thought… it just keeps on going). The main idea is that there’s something deeply wrong with the world. It is not our home and we are not at home in it. We are merely sojourners here, biding our time until we step off into that great journey that will take us to a…

The Problem of Evil in Free Market Theology

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…mounts to much the same thing) away from becoming a millionaire. What is most striking about Laderman’s suggestion is that it helps us to see why the economic crisis is so shattering, and why the accountants are monitoring the returns so closely… Black Friday, Bruised Saturday, Cyber Monday. In short, if James Buchan is right and there is an implicit theology to this marketplace, then what we experienced in 2007 and 2008—and what we are still expe…

Too Little, Too Late?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…communication of four Lefebvrite bishops was announced, it was only the first step in their re-entry into communion with the Catholic church. The four bishop are essentially non-personae until such time as they are assigned new duties, allowing them to preside over the sacraments, ordain new priests, etcetera. Now we know that Bishop Williamson will not be so assigned until he recants his views about the existence of Nazi gas chambers in some suit…

State as Executioner: Rick Perry Did Not Invent the Death Penalty

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ave been a fiction created for the purposes of the film. No, I insisted, most states in our union (35 out of 50) continue to administer the ultimate penalty, notably all the states that constituted the Old Confederacy. They still didn’t believe it. The whole thing was just unthinkable in Europe. And they thought of the United States as a cultural extension of Europe… which it most decidedly is not, in terms of religion and culture. When they final…

How Not To Respond to Haiti

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…tself to righteous finger-wagging, western incrimination, and more. I am most struck by the modern-ness of these matters, as well as by Nietzsche’s patient cautioning about the potential abuse built in to the language of “good and evil.” The paradox, one well noted by Nietzsche, is that I, located confidently on the political left, become positively moralistic in my outrage at Pat Robertson’s moral analysis of the Haitian disaster. None of this he…

RDBook: Whither the Religious Left?

By Bill Berkowitz

…ring live-streaming the event on the internet.) Clarkson was one of the first investigative reporters to look deeply at the Religious Right in the US. Often ahead of the pack he broke the story in Mother Jones of the rise of Christian militias years before the Oklahoma City bombing made them national news; he went undercover at the founding strategy conferences of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and revealed in Church & State magazine their pl…