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Pariah or Charmed Hero: America’s Obsession with Jews and Israel

By Shaul Magid

…i [conventional themes]; indeed to the contrary. Jewish stereotypes of almost startling crudeness recur throughout the text, sometimes attached to Jews, but more often, and more interestingly, floating free of them. In these books, the Jews that play their role as practicing—that is, Orthodox—Jews and those who support right-wing policies in Israel (secular or religious) may be saved in the rapture as Jews. The fact that they needn’t convert to br…

Ugandan Landslide a Message from God?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

If we listen to some religious leaders, natural disasters don’t just happen—there is a supernatural reason for them. In short, God is angry, and natural disasters are God’s way of helping us to see the light and repent, repent, repent, before it’s too late. (Well, for those who survived the hurricane, or flood, or earthquake, anyway. For those who didn’t, it’s presumably, already too late.) Hurricanes like Katrina were blamed on gays and feminist…

Rick Warren’s Biblical Blowback

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ir policing and judicial functions. But that is not at all what Warren’s most astonishing claim (in bold above) actually calls to mind. Rather, it is utterly and thoroughly of the Old Testament; and it reads those scriptures completely backward. Let me explain why. One of the great mysteries for any careful reader of the Bible is the book of Joshua, with its staggering depiction of what appears to be a God-ordained genocide of Canaanites, includin…

Elizabeth Warren, American Evangelist

By Peter Laarman

…oppose her in the runup to 2020. And while the senator from Massachusetts still insists she does not have her sights on the presidency, she is on the interview circuit talking about the subject of newest book, This Fight is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class, with what we might well call “evangelical” zeal. Hence this reflection, from Peter Laarman, on the many uses of the term. –The Eds. In our ongoing conversations these days…

Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates: The Problem with Popularization

By Kathryn Lofton

…importantly, I know I am not a hipster because I do not have an inherent distrust of the popular. To be clear, a distrust of the popular is not a bad thing. There is a lot within popular productions that should inspire righteous disdain, and to that end generations of admirable academic and lay observers have waxed happy hipster on mass mediocrity. Against this critical discernment, over the last forty years American studies and cultural studies h…

The Mystic in the Rye: JD Salinger’s Religious Fiction

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ish” (from his 1953 collection, Nine Stories). Yet what is assuredly the most disturbing story in the collection is the ninth one, “Teddy.” This one tells the tale of yet one more “wise child,” a spiritual adept who is far enough evolved as to recall his prior incarnations. He also knows that the karmic wheel has dictated that this time around he is destined to be killed by his younger sister, who will push him into an empty pool on a cruise ship….

Paul Weyrich, “Godfather” of Modern Conservative Movement, Dead at 66

By Bill Berkowitz

…o-called Republican Revolution of 1994, Weyrich had his eyes on the prize: steadfastly working to figure out how conservatives could regroup and rebuild from the ashes of the overwhelming defeat suffered by Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Weyrich, labeled an anti-Semite for repeating the blood libel that “Christ was crucified by the Jews,” back in 2001, nevertheless had an extraordinary list of accomplishments: He “start…

Fragments of Secular Sanctity

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ree fingers and a tooth were removed, to their eventual placement on display in a public museums. In a tomb, out of a tomb, and halfway back again. If you want to understand the strange story of religion, science and art in the modern period, then public museums may well be the thing to put our fingers on….

Just War Tradition v. David Brooks on 9/11 Trials

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ining it as “the latest front in a global war on terror.” That requires imagination, as well as determination and strength of purpose. This Guantanamo decision is thus perhaps the first step toward the announcement of this new vision, the vision for a war the President intends to bring to a reasonable and just conclusion….

‘Rome is Gay’

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…e Rome, with its super-saturation of history. Things do not stand still or stay static. Things change. An Egyptian thing or a Gretomb may become a guard tower which may end up guarding a cemetery all over again. And tomorrow that same Pyramid will become the central symbol and staging area for an ancient-style Roman triumph celebrating a very modern kind of gay pride. And one day after that, some thousands of miles away, citizens in the United Sta…