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Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Avatar and the Myth of Originality

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…ng on your perspective and imagination: a tale of American colonization, a cheap rip-off of Pocahantas or Russian science fiction, an allegory for the Chinese industrialization process. Writing in the New York Times last week, Dave Itzkoff outlined the many ways in which James Cameron’s Avatar has been praised and/or condemned, the ways viewers have interpreted the movie as an allegory for this or that, the way it might even serve as a “Rorschach…

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

By Karen E. Park

…y, the president managed to create both a bizarre visual tableau and a transcript that rivaled his cringeworthy speech to the Boy Scouts. Flanked by the miserable-looking First Lady and the comically aghast Easter Bunny, Trump spoke to the children about the booming economy and the “$700 billion going into our military”—not topics usually favored by the kindergarten set. He also seemed to forget the name of the White House saying “there really is…

Doubt v. Predator: A Vatican II Parable

By Gabriel Mckee

…oss-pollination of secular and religious cultures. Set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964 (taken from Shanley’s own childhood experience), the school’s principal, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), is almost comically tyrannical. The parish priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is unconventional, almost hip, peppering his sermons with jokes and hugging students. The setting is ripe for tension, though it doesn’t explode until Sister James (A…

The Moral Bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Asceticism

By Vlad Chituc

…es a compelling case against this kind of “sharing” economy, calling it “a scheme to shift risk from companies to workers, discourage labor organizing, and ensure that capitalists can reap huge profits with low fixed costs.” Few can afford a cabin in the woods; far fewer can afford Rhinehart’s 21st century Silicon Valley upgrade. Maybe we will one day live in a techno-ascetic utopia, where parking lots become parks and power plants become museums…

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

By Michelle Goldberg

…d a few days ago. “The debate among Republicans is whether to go after downscale or upscale voters,” he wrote. “Those who argue for going downscale usually have a 2012 candidate in mind: Sarah Palin. She has an undoubted appeal to such voters and revved up part of the Republican base—cultural conservatives, and rural and small-town voters—throughout the campaign… But my examination of the exit poll results and county-by-county election returns has…

Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse

By Peter Laarman

…eady—to a shared expectation that the End is near and that the End will be scary. Paul shares something of this same End Times consciousness; he clearly expects Christ to return in his own lifetime, although for him the expectation is less frightening than reassuring. For Christians of a literalist persuasion, the End Times can be delayed but never denied. Thus there have been, at various intervals, moments of heightened expectation and frenzy. AD…

Why the ‘Confession & Redemption’ Path is Unlikely to Help Falwell Recover from Sex Scandal

By Chrissy Stroop

…alwell story indeed just another run-of-the-mill evangelical celebrity sex scandal? To be sure, there is a pattern of such scandals, and worse—sexual assault and abuse, and coverups—in evangelical institutions, precisely because of their strict patriarchal norms backed by the conservative theology that Mefferd shares. Meanwhile, the redemptive arc that Mefferd decries is indeed often available to male evangelical leaders caught up in sex scandals,…

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

By Brittany Shoot

…fy low paid but spiritually sound employment as a fast food clerk, it is disconcerting that companies like Hobby Lobby are not called upon to explain their reliance on cheap goods and labor. Exploitative working conditions, even if ones tucked out of sight in overseas factories, can’t be justified by religious rhetoric. Bethany Moreton, author of the recent To Serve God and Wal-Mart, spoke with me about these contradictions. “Evangelical interpret…

First Things First: Sexual Equality Just Is

By Kate Blanchard

…o enter Regnerus’s imagination. Neither does he imagine that husbands who eschew housework have more sex than husbands who do their share because the former are more self-centered or aggressive than the latter, or because the latter don’t expect to be “paid” for doing work women have always done. Women and men can now both have equally “cheap sex” thanks to the Pill, but Regnerus concludes that this has come back to bite the very women who thought…

Body Language: Michael Jackson and the Illogic of White Superiority

By Anthony B. Pinn

…arance. There is so much meaning and importance in the observation made by scholars who argue that the body is a contested terrain. That is to say, it is on and through the body that our cultural imaginations and social assumptions play out. Michael Jackson’s shifting appearance is a strong example of the texture of that contestation. It is almost as if deeper entrenchment in the popular imagination of the United States (and a growing global commu…