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

By Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry

…in its public policies, national identity, and sacred symbols is of the utmo*]}*st importance. We call this ideology Christian nationalism. It’s all about privileging Christianity in American society. In our new book, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism 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 routinel…

Sex Buys the Pulitzer Prize

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s Report in the New York Times, a report notable most for its own voyeuristic perversion, with singular embarrassment and disgust today. Do such things really deserve such rewards? Compare these awards to two others also announced on Monday. For “Public Service Reporting,” the Las Vegas Sun received the award for its reporting of large numbers of construction-related deaths in the city, deaths directly or indirectly tied…

Boehner Should Take A Breather

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…t 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 commitment to tax cuts will work any better. Boehner says that he sees no evidence Obama’s stimulus will really create jobs, whereas his tax cuts will. Th…

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

…have 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 fin…

Fragments of Secular Sanctity

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…sacred and profane. This is partly a story about the modern museum. The first modern public art museum in the world was opened to the public in 1734, in Rome, just three years before the alleged theft of Galileo’s suspect digits. This was the Capitoline Museum, funded by the Vatican and created by order of Pope Clement XII. It was a museum in our sense of that word—anyone, male or female, could purchase a ticket on any day the museum was open, and…

Where in the World is Sarah Palin?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…or more. The Republican coalition his time around—a loose hodge-podge of economic conservatives, social conservatives, religious conservatives, and ardent nationalists—is fractured almo*]}*st beyond repair. And this is what Sarah Palin’s candidacy really has to teach us. The meaning of “conservatism“ is also very much in flux.…

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

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…institutions funded by the US government, the Centers for Disease Control most notably. But the President is wrong to suggest that politics can simply be extracted from scientific enquiry. This simple statement is actually part of much larger misunderstanding of the emergence of a conflict between modern science and traditional religion. Galileo’s problems with the papacy had more to do with politics than with theology, for instance. He was caugh…

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

By Kathryn Lofton

…ographer(s); and because I have never worn a sweatband during the workday. Most 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 critica…

Heteronormativity: A Discussion

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…the current state of the religion-and-culture wars? Perhaps. First and foremo*]}*st, one is struck by the nearly apocalyptic rhetoric on all sides. The liberal Obama’s gesture to conservatism is feared as announcing the death of the political left. The parallel gesture to the gay and lesbian community is thought to be the end of the world among some conservative hardliners. It is that strange note of apocalypse that struck me first, and gives me cause…