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Gun-Wielding White Couple Make Perfect Protagonists for Republican Convention’s ‘Great American Story’

By Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry

…sm in the United States, we show that Christian nationalism was one of the strongest predictors of support for Trump in 2016, and continues to be for the political wedge issues he routinely highlights. Trump and his supporters have repeatedly emphasized the dangers Christian Americans supposedly face if he’s not reelected. For Trump followers, Christianity is fundamental to telling the Great American Story. But our research repeatedly shows that t…

Sex Buys the Pulitzer Prize

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…e hold them to such a low level of journalistic scrutiny. How many times must I listen to a nightly newscaster tell me in hushed tones that “this shocking story”—of teen sex parties, or prostitution, or sexual slavery—will be seen later tonight?… if I will dutifully watch the commercials and stay up until the last segment of the news. Sex sells. A free society needs a free press, of that the Founders were certain. Investigative reporting is the tr…

Boehner Should Take A Breather

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…note to give Christmas bonuses early. So words of Republican caution and mistrust are well-intentioned and deserved. But what would count as evidence that such a stimulus will work? We are all in uncharted territory, doing what most capitalists apparently have been doing of late: taking enormous risks with enormous sums of money. What Boehner needs to tell the President, with a modicum of respect the man has earned, is why his Party’s manta-like c…

Bangladesh’s Atheist Blogger Still Wants to Talk

By Austin Dacey

…rocities committed during the 1971 war for independence of what was then East Pakistan, many of whom went on to become leaders in religious parties such as Jamaat, bent on sabotaging the country’s strides towards secular democracy. In February 2013, after the long-sought International Crimes Tribunal convicted Abdul Quader Mollah and others of war crimes, mass protests denounced the sentences as overly lenient and demanded death sentences and the…

State as Executioner: Rick Perry Did Not Invent the Death Penalty

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ave been a fiction created for the purposes of the film. No, I insisted, most states in our union (35 out of 50) continue to administer the ultimate penalty, notably all the states that constituted the Old Confederacy. They still didn’t believe it. The whole thing was just unthinkable in Europe. And they thought of the United States as a cultural extension of Europe… which it most decidedly is not, in terms of religion and culture. When they final…

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….

Where in the World is Sarah Palin?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…s”); on billboards (“Got Jesus?”); and on T-shirts (“Property of Jesus Christ”). All this suggests that the old political truisms are true, that Palin is an asset to the shrinking Republican base that self-identifies as evangelical, fundamentalist, or born again. But the new political wisdom is that such persons of faith do not vote as a single block anymore (if they ever did), and they do not swing elections, either. On the campaign trail, McCain…

Stem Cell Chronicles: Why Politics and Science Most Certainly Should Not Be Separated

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…Health. But “conservative” citizens are right to ask how many non-specialists or non-scientists sit on such review boards. In most other academic arenas, scholars are forced to write proposals for a multi-disciplinary audience, thereby making them accessible to most people, including the informed and engaged private citizen. Might we demand the same of current genetic science? I repeat: Don’t get me wrong. The President is in a fight and he knows…

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…

Heteronormativity: A Discussion

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…eal of the new Republic. I think that this particular form of American Christianity still hews heavily to that norm because it was fundamentally re-elaborated in that 19th century social context, and they can’t really separate what might be “Christian” according to the New Testament from the most highly valued 19th century social norms. I find the evangelical sacralization of the nuclear family almost heretical myself, and I personally rather disl…