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Evangelicals Clutching Pearls Over Student Debt Relief: Lord Have Mercy!

By Peter Laarman

…d in Christianity Today and elsewhere, where scholars and cranks play whack-a-mole with Bible verses having to do with debt. What I like best is the Can we proof-text this? We probably shouldn’t. But let’s try anyway! aspect of it. Not to mention the dominant focus on rival passages in the Hebrew Bible without much, if any, attention paid to how Jesus responded to debt peonage in his time and place. Stefani McDade begins her Christianity Today rou…

In Hamline Case, the ‘Free Expression vs. Religious Sensibilities’ Frame Obscures a Stark Reality About Higher Education

By Junaid Jahangir

…when it comes to pay, benefits, leave, promotion, and job security. Divide-and-rule is not a new tactic, for it’s well known in the Indian subcontinent that the British pitted one local Raja against the other based on tribe, religion, or caste—among other factors. The same applies to corporations as they stoke divisiveness in society by indulging in performative activism. They misdirect the attention of people towards who said what and why and aw…

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

By Peter Laarman

…ation but also appears at times to admire Pecksniff’s immense skill in self-justification and self-congratulation. Dickens makes the most of Pecksniff by giving him a number of interior monologues, as here when Pecksniff is rationalizing his decision to pimp out his younger daughter at a rather cheap dowry price to a rich but grotesquely uncouth suitor: All his life long he had been walking up and down the narrow ways and by-places, with a hook in…

On the 40th Anniversary of Hyde, A Theological Defense of Reproductive Justice

By Anita Little

…try exam. The other one, for whom scrambling the several hundred needed out-of-pocket was unfeasible, carried her child to term, giving birth a few weeks before prom. Their futures would only continue to diverge. For the past four decades, the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion, has made it nearly impossible for low-income women—predominantly women of color—to obtain a legal abortion. It’s the only procedure ever banned f…

RDBook: Apocalypse Without God

By Nathan Schneider

…. One of the arguments of the book is that what Luther did for religion vis-à-vis the Catholic Church at the time was to privatize and deregulate and decentralize it. Those three principles, of course, are what eventually becomes neo-liberal economics. The Reformation was a product of and promoted a communications revolution in terms of print. Conservative Protestants have always been the first to understand the significance of new technologies. I…

Note for Today

By Amina Wadud

…ss in white more often? Exercise and Diet Well, I’ve hit the awful plateau, 15 pounds down but gone in the first three weeks. I wish I had managed more than the once a day daily walk, too. This is not just vanity, nor even that pre-diabetes diagnosis, but I really want to be fit for all the activity. I hope I can avoid the prediction that everyone gets sick, even if just a cold. The only thing I want taxed is my soul, not my aging body. But there…

House GOP Hires Lawyer to Prevent Federal Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ehner appears ready to go to great lengths, and the great expense of a high-power law firm, to try to score some cheap political points on the backs of same-sex couples.” I suppose Boehner can pander to the religious right and continue to defend “traditional” marriage, but I think it’s fair to ask why—when jobless rates continue to hover near 10 percent—which issue may be most important to God: how people arrange their intimate relationships, or h…

The Social Science Animal: Brooks Argues for Emotion over Reason

By Beatrice Marovich

…mboyant, decorous (and, indeed, sometimes long-winded) answers. Back in the 18th century Jean-Jacques Rousseau published a little book he called Émile: or, On Education. This treatise—whose utopian propositions would go on to inspire figures in both the French and American revolutions—was not modest about its aims. Rousseau promised to do nothing less than shape the very destiny and life journey of his human reader. “To live is the trade I will te…

Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…or to fill in the salacious details. Was that the confession of a seventeen-year-old or a fifty-year-old? The age of consent leaves no obvious trace on our twitter-voices. And did the sin really happen at all? Maybe the prurient pleasure was not with any sophomore, but with us; a dirty joke traded against misplaced credulity. All we know is that both penances were accepted. Penance, an application released for the iPhone in early December, allows…

Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

…rity than that of victim. The book fairly bristles with resentment and self-pity about “the politically-motivated attacks that began the day I was announced as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008.” Perhaps that, in the end, accounts for her popularity. We live in an age where victimization carries undeniable cachet. If you can somehow make the case that you’ve been treated unfairly or that your tribe (Republicans, “patriotic America…