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Dispatches from the Borderlands: Missing Voices

…lers, agribusiness, hotel chains, restauranteurs, and consumers) that feed cheaply off their precarious status at the bottom of our economic food chain? How to balance national security concerns with pragmatic ones over economic productivity? The debate has drawn the usual cast of advocates: policy wonks, border vigilantes, and religious leaders. Some religious leaders, that is: Others have been notable in their silence. In the case of Arellano, b…

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Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

…w each of these former homosexuals lived their lives in clubs, engaging in cheap, easy, and often public sex, or were sexually abused. For all the claptrap the religious right yells about how they don’t want to think of us “that way,” the trailer for the film is positively voyeuristic! Let’s face it, gay sex is completely titillating to heterosexuals, especially conservative Christian heterosexuals. They can’t stop thinking about us in bed! Remind…

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“Giving Godhead”: A Bloody Vision of Religion’s Deepest Influence

…us moments at a revival, goes slack sometimes, and this book has its limp, cheap moments, cellophane grass and gassy puns that might only elicit an “organ yawn” from readers. It may not be the best poetry collection in English published this year—that may, in fact, like rivers of milk and honey or peace and goodwill between all humans on earth, simply not be a thing—but Giving Godhead is a worthwhile example of art using the so-called sacrilegious…

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“Hey You! Anti-Semite!”: A Jewish Krewe does Mardi Gras

…bauchery, but the parade tradition is about more than drunken tourists and cheap plastic beads. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras parades began in 1857, with the Mistick Krewe of Comus, a secret society that wanted to emulate the Mardi Gras parades of Mobile, Alabama. From the start, Mardi Gras krewes were exclusive, elite clubs. Such organizations can be important networking opportunities in a small community like New Orleans, where people are used to doin…

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Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

I read Going Rogue on an airplane while jetting across the continent to visit the author’s church, Wasilla Bible Church. I remember pulling the book surreptitiously out of my satchel and opening the cover with some mixture of dread and resignation, figuring that I might someday be able to make a case that the hours spent reading the book should count as a credit toward Purgatory. The autobiography was, as I suspected, pretty insubstantial, filled…

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The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

…ional or decadent. That said, Neiwert slams those who misuse the term for “cheap political theater,” writing that “inappropriate comparisons tend to obscure the reality of what’s taking place.” So what is the reality? Neiwert recently spoke with Religion Dispatches about violent rhetoric, imprecatory prayer, and eliminationism.  Religion Dispatches: You begin the book talking primarily about the excesses of media personalities like Rush Limbaugh,…

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Churches Can No Longer Hide the Truth: Daniel Dennett on the New Transparency

…ing discoveries of science. Gods and flaming chariots are nothing, they’re cheap comic book fare, compared to what we actually have learned about stars and galaxies and the like. I think that there’s a sort of mirror image, an opposite of scientism, which has a real tin ear for the breathtaking awesomeness of science. All you have to do is listen to David Attenborough or Carl Sagan or other brilliant expositors of science to see just how jaw-dropp…

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Death in the Desert: Riding With the Samaritans

…grants from their homes. They are pulled to the U.S. because of demand for cheap labor. One of the major pushes came in the ’90s with the passage of NAFTA, which opened the door to many agri-businesses to move farms down to Mexico, putting small farmers out of business. And while the number of undocumented border crossers is down, Brother David says, it will be virtually impossible to eliminate them as long as the opportunities for jobs exist. As…

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Springtime for Ross Douthat?

…ands Francis’ amazing, charismatic realignment of Catholic priorities as a cheap publicity stunt to get hippies in the pew. He completely misunderstands Francis’ speech to Congress as plumping for liberal values—and I’m not entirely sure he gets that Martin Luther King wasn’t a Catholic. On and on it goes. Douthat snipes at “a liberalism that thinks it can impose meaning on a cosmos whose sound and fury signifies nothing on its own,” without bothe…

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

…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…

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