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Despising the Holidays: When Christians Led the ‘War on Christmas’

By Ed Simon

…became the equivalent of a blockbuster. In the chaos of the era print was cheap and plentiful, and the collapse of the licensing laws insured a degree of free speech hitherto unknown in the British Isles. The World Turned Upside Down would prove so enduring that it has been an English folk ballad for more than 350 years. The song’s opening verse, “Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d. /Old Christmas is kicked out of Town” remains per…

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…tuffed with facts and dates and figures” and sometimes strained “to find a way to tie them together.” He also called it “an unusually serious and, to use a word the producers would probably rather not see, intellectual endeavor for television, one that doesn’t make many compromises for short attention spans.” Some professional historians and scholars of American religion, in contrast, criticized the show from the opposite direction. This is not a…

Israel’s Immigration Debate: “Where is the Jewish Spirit?”

By Mati Wagner

…rocess their discriminatory work permits. These “guest” workers, who today number between 250,000 and 400,000 (half of whom are illegal) did not only toil. They fell in love and established families and had children, probably more than 2,000 children, who were sent to state-run schools like Tel Aviv’s Bialik-Rogozin to learn with young Israelis their age to read, to write and to add and subtract—in Hebrew. They also were taught about the miraculou…

Why Egypt is America’s Enemy

By Haroon Moghul

…llow Arabs, demonized and derided for years, such that their blood becomes cheap. This happens all too often with minorities; what is unique about the Arab world is the degree to which many dictatorships also oppress the majority. My point in that essay about Tunisia was that we in America and the West generally reflexively associate secularism with what is good and democratic, and conservatism (specifically, in Islam) with that which is antidemo…

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

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…gths, 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 how we feed and care for those families…

On Eve of Sudan Split Clashes Continue

By Ashley Makar

…splaced civilians trying to leave Abyei are stranded in the rain. The only way south is via dirt roads. William went north, to get an education. “They can break your leg, but they can’t break your mind,” he told me. First, he studied Arabic in Khartoum, so he could learn to protect himself from the Sudanese army and the Misseriya. Then, like thousands of displaced Sudanese, William migrated to Egypt, hoping to be resettled to the West by the UN re…

Fear of a Catholic Ghetto

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ented from holding public office. In the mid-nineteenth century, while the number of Catholic hospitals was growing, the Know Nothing party organized around shared fears that Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany were overwhelming the country and acting against white Protestant interests. So the fear of a Catholic ghetto must be understood in light of a real history of Catholics being marginalized during the very time that their health car…

Gas For Two Bucks a Gallon? Bachmann Taps a Pipeline to the American Sacred

By Rosamond C. Rodman

…he private capsule of the car, but shared and civic space. The federal highway system—the real America—on the other hand, operates as a widely dispersed, center-less system for individual travelers on separate routes, an enactment of the American protestant primordial act: the prioritizing, centering, and sacralizing of the individual in pursuit of their own happiness. A few months ago, when the California Department of Transportation closed a por…

Richard Dawkins’ Atheist Academy of Unguided Truth

By Paul Wallace

…God loves you because your priest told you so? And so on. These were not cheap shots. He was serious. He loved us, he loved his job, and his questions were troubling. Some students wept. At which point he would offer Kleenexes. It was in Fr. Cavanaugh’s class that I began to see that all true education is intensely personal. Dawkins’ distaste for an officially atheist academy may be mere iconoclasm. But maybe not. Maybe it’s closer to the truth…

Doubt v. Predator: A Vatican II Parable

By Gabriel Mckee

…lynn abuse his student, or didn’t he?—but Shanley doesn’t want us to walk away with an answer. Father Flynn’s explanation is plausible enough, but his behavior is strange enough to hint that Sister Aloysius is right, and both characters are convincing. Ultimately, the truth is unknowable. The student is Schroedinger’s cat, existing in two states simultaneously, both abuses and not abused depending on whose argument we’re listening to at any given…