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Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse

By Peter Laarman

…ous God must cleanse the earth of filth and corruption before Christ’s thousand-year reign on Earth can commence. Secular climate-change doomsayers may not use the term Gaia in their work or believe that Earth itself possesses consciousness, but they still tend to suggest that Mother Earth has been grievously wounded by the relentless abuse she has suffered—and that she will have her ways of striking back. • Each apocalyptic frame preaches that…

Why Egypt is America’s Enemy

By Haroon Moghul

…ow said military can secure the country, regain control of the Sinai—a thousand times harder after what happened yesterday—or hold its end of the bargain up with Israel. Likely, Israel will soon be sending its own drones and planes into the Sinai, if it hasn’t already. From today on, a substantial plurality of many Arab countries, which identify as Islamist, now see the ballot box as closed to them. All votes are equal, but some votes are more equ…

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

By Barbra Barnett

…rganizations like the ADL continue to monitor self-declared anti-Semitism, numbers are down in the long term. The advance of social acceptance of Jews into American culture has perhaps been aided by the ability and willingness of many American Jews to blend in. No one has to know you are Jewish if you Anglify your last name, stop speaking Yiddish, stop wearing distinctive clothing, drop dietary regulations, pay plastic surgeons to re-shape your pr…

Noah v. Kitschy Jesus: A Tale of Two Movies

By Jay Michaelson

…an’t quite pinpoint what all of these had in common, except that they were cheap, over-simplified, and kitschy. And thanks to Walter Benjamin, Clement Greenberg, the Frankfurt School, and a legion of writers and musicians allergic to the cliché, I came to reject kitsch and its quasi-fascistic associations. Feel this way, think this way, act this way—no! It took another several years before I really understood that some people, perhaps most people,…

There’s No Business Like the Bible Business: 200 Years of the ABS

By Paul Harvey

…appear through this book, sometimes with numbing frequency and volume. Thousands of Bibles in the early years of the ABS; tens of thousands some decades later; millions and millions through the course of the twentieth century. The numbers document the stunning capacity of the ABS to flood the zone with Scriptures. Through the book, the ABS accomplished exactly that on the western frontier in the early nineteenth century, Union soldiers’ camps duri…

Holding Out for a Hero: New ID Book Aims to Save You From Despair of Evolution

By Kriti Sharma

…nremarkable button marked “God made proteins.” But salvation is not such a cheap, glib thing. Those who are serious about salvation are serious about creating the conditions of genuine ease and assurance for others in the face of their deepest terrors and despairs. What this requires is much more difficult, interesting, and rewarding than trying to win the same tired arguments about the structure of molecules. What is needed, for theists and athei…

On the 40th Anniversary of Hyde, A Theological Defense of Reproductive Justice

By Anita Little

…he same Bible out of which my conservative brothers and sisters pull these cheap one-liners to control the conversation about reproductive health also shows us the life and ministry of Jesus—whom we all claim to follow. The Jesus of the Gospel always treated poor people and people in crisis with compassion, never judgement. I don’t understand how you can claim to model yourself on Jesus while seeking to constantly judge and shame and limit people….

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…e?” 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 having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…

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…

Dylann Roof Was Wrong: The Race War Isn’t Coming, It’s Here

By Willie James Jennings

…ood from as much of the world as possible, in land, natural resources, and cheap labor. What does it mean to be born in a place that measures your value, your worth, your very life by the calculus of possession? That calculus extends through time to us from those founding greed-filled moments invading our waking consciousness and driving us forward in a strange confession. We believe in competition born of the desire to possess. We believe in stri…