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Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…ed that she had a disabled son. Here and there, Penance hurts. Between the cheap jokes and bourgeois self-loathing are murmurs worth hearing, if only as microfiction. Likewise, the app’s agnosticism facilitates a lucid tableau of spontaneous popular theology. Of the 24 confessions, only one references God as an active third party, two command the Sinner to forgive themselves, and three confessors speak in the first person as God. “God forgive me,”…

The Problem with Christian Gentlemen: A Short Goodbye to Ted Cruz, the “Mr. Pecksniff” of Presidential Politics

By Peter Laarman

…d self-congratulation. Dickens makes the most of Pecksniff by giving him a number of interior monologues, as here when Pecksniff is rationalizing his decision to pimp out his younger daughter at a rather cheap dowry price to a rich but grotesquely uncouth suitor: All his life long he had been walking up and down the narrow ways and by-places, with a hook in one hand and a crook in the other, scraping all sorts of valuable odds and ends into his po…

Fear of a Catholic Ghetto

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…their rituals the subject of ridicule. They were suspected of being un-American, loyal to the Pope, incapable of liberty. At times Catholics were prevented 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…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…rd, all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them—is that right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffocate the rights of conscience?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by h…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: “They Came at Night, Trying to Kill Us!”

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…o think that anti-immigrant violence of the scale recently seen in South Africa is not possible in America. However, the widespread violence perpetrated at the end of the 19th century against Chinese immigrants as reaction to the “yellow peril” and the Zoot Suit riots in the early 1940s give us plenty of reasons not to be overly complacent. Cases of anti-immigrant violence in South Africa and the US also show that, while the effects of undocumente…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…ublic discourse. This accounts for the powerful role churches played for African Americans during the civil rights movement. Since the issue of immigration ultimately has to do with how inclusive America can and should be, churches must be a part of the conversation. Moreover, one of the first things that immigrants do as they settle in the United States is to look for places where they can practice their religions collectively. Often they come to…

When Being “Christian” Means Supporting Trump: An Argument For Hiding Your Faith

By Jonathan Malesic

…lined, “The Court Follows Its Heart and Completes the Secularization of America.” Completes the secularization of America? That was fast. The men who lead the Christian Right seem to have a poor sense of history and politics. And despite their self-proclaimed allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, they see the presidency as a position equivalent in power to the Roman emperor, with every candidate either an absolute friend to the church or an absolut…

Can I Get Some Birth Control Pills With That Slushie?: Unpacking the Contraceptive Mandate Rollback

By Sunnivie Brydum

…usly espoused this idea that contraceptives are so widely available and so cheap that the mandate was unnecessary. He said “all you have to do is walk into a 7-Eleven or any shop on any street in America and have access to them.” Opponents of the mandate have consistently belittled the idea that contraceptives are a significant health care cost for women despite the fact that, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, birth control comprises betw…

Must We Burn Something to Get Attention?: 50 Years After the Catonsville Nine

By Jason C. Bivins

…before state houses across the country, teeming with teachers? What do America’s religions say to those Americans with disabilities being hauled off by Capitol cops, and to the numberless people standing against legal authority that suspects them for the crime of simply being black or Muslim or queer? If we think about Catonsville not just as a curiosity, a minor episode in the history of radical chic, but as a provocation or a template, what do…

Why Egypt is America’s Enemy

By Haroon Moghul

…press 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 antidemocratic and oppressive. As I wrote: This assumption lazily equates the public practice of Islam with all things undemocratic, whereas we are inclined to view secularism—even when enforced by a dictator—as explicit…