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This is Not a Religion Column: Christian Candidate Quiz Bowl

By Jeff Sharlet

…nd Vitter and Foley, Ney and DeLay and Duke Cunningham, but also the lesser-known luminaries of the many right-wing revolutions that seemed once, not so long ago, to be cresting irresistibly together, Christian crusaders and invisible handers and “New American Century” dreamers all riding the same tsunami. Consider now the crestfallen. This week’s winners: Tim Goeglein, “pipeline to the President” for religious conservatives, given the shove after…

Seeking Broad Appeal to US Christians, ‘God & Country: The Rise of Christian Nationalism’ Glosses Over Critical Context

By Chrissy Stroop

…the old evangelical “WWJD” fad in promotional materials—thanks for the not-at-all annoying reminder that I wore those cringe cloth bracelets in the 1990s, my dudes—I hoped the film itself would focus less on efforts to “save” Christianity and more on the very real threat to our democracy from authoritarian Christians. Unfortunately, the WWJD invocation was a tell. At the end of the day, God & Country is more concerned with laundering the reputati…

Hajj Journal: Tawaf: How I Fell in Love…

By Amina Wadud

…as high as your ears, with palms toward the black stone, and recite “bismi-Lah, Allahu Akbar laa ilaha illa-Allah.” Then raise your right hand as if in greeting and bring it back to kiss. If you are close enough to the stone, you’re supposed to kiss it. If you cannot kiss it, you should touch it with the right hand; if not, then just wave and kiss the hand. People also will touch it with an item of clothing and then kiss that, if they are close e…

How To Control Your Ungodly Urges… On a Budget!

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…r example) responded with the unprecedented, totally creative, really-takes-an-intelligent-person-to-come-up-with-it tactic of calling Fluke, and her friends, sluts who can’t control themselves. (Patricia Heaton, the star from Everybody Loves Raymond who once won an award from Feminists [!!] for Life, tweeted a whole series of insulting tips for “G-Town Gal,” which were SO FUNNY!) Ha ha! Oh, stop, my sides hurt! Obviously I’m being sarcastic. Name…

Turn on the News: Some Abortion Opponents May Opt For a New Vaccine, But Behind Their Skepticism it’s Often a Different Story — of Disinformation, Conspiratorial Thinking, and White Nationalism

By Daniel Schultz

…d “some” is doing a lot of work here. As Jenkins points out, only about one-in-ten Americans claim religious objections to COVID vaccination. That figure comes from a PRRI poll, which doesn’t break down the objections any further. Meaning, we don’t know how much of that 10% is rooted in concerns over abortion. It could be that people are balking because they see vaccination as unnecessary, or because they see vaccines as contaminants, both of whic…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…The problem of access to birth control in the United States has been single-handedly solved by Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Need birth control? Just run over to 7-11 and pick some up. Appearing on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Dolan praised the plaintiffs in the Hobby LobbySupreme Court case as inspiring examples of American religious conviction and told guest host Norah O’Donnell that cutting contraception out of insurance policies wasn’t a problem: Is…

Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…lacious details. Was that the confession of a seventeen-year-old or a fifty-year-old? The age of consent leaves no obvious trace on our twitter-voices. And did the sin really happen at all? Maybe the prurient pleasure was not with any sophomore, but with us; a dirty joke traded against misplaced credulity. All we know is that both penances were accepted. Penance, an application released for the iPhone in early December, allows users to absolve one…

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

By Kriti Sharma

…ur own fear and pain and get you home safely. Despite Axe’s passionate call-to-action, heroes are actually not badly needed. But friends are. Good friends don’t need to be particularly heroic, pious, smart, strong, or good. They’re not free of fear or uncertainty. Rather, they’re just attentive enough to their own fears and uncertainties to support others who are facing the same. Unlike the savior-evangelist, the good friend trusts you to be able…

Springtime for Ross Douthat?

By Daniel Schultz

…form.” It’s that he does all that, and then, like a cherry high atop a five-scoop sundae of stupid, he throws this in: “In the intellectual arena, religiously-inclined liberals have pined for a Reinhold Niebuhr without producing one.” Hmm. The only person I know of pining for Reinhold Niebuhr is David Brooks. If that’s your definition of a liberal, God help us all. No, liberal Christians these days have moved on from Niebuhr, who after all ended h…

Why Conservatives Really Oppose Federal Aid for the ‘Undeserving’

By Daniel Schultz

…he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, to the more up-to-date proclamation that the economy should reopen to save the stock market, even if it meant potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths. Some of them really seem to believe that rich people are better than everybody else. I suppose the “to be fair” part of this is to say that Congressional Republicans believe it’s important to fuel industries that employ thousands direc…