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“Giving Godhead”: A Bloody Vision of Religion’s Deepest Influence

By Spencer Dew

…archment tastes just like the honey of that many-mansioned heaven in the by-and-by sky. Krieger shows us the bodily as both central to and taboo within that tradition. Something two-faced lurks, these poems suggest, in the way we cry out the word God when we writhe like the damned in hot pits, or how we think of transcending death through the petites morts we tremor through. Our bodies offer both rough bondage and temporary redemption—blood and vi…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…s purely sexual beings. Foster’s screed is simply a long promo for a new ex-gay movie coming out, and the trailer, three-minutes of nauseating footage, centers around how each of these former homosexuals lived their lives in clubs, engaging in cheap, easy, and often public sex, or were sexually abused. For all the claptrap the religious right yells about how they don’t want to think of us “that way,” the trailer for the film is positively voyeuris…

Is the Satanic Temple Just an Elaborate Prank? 10 Questions for the Author of ‘Speak of the Devil’

By Joseph Laycock

…e are also more sympathetic people who still assume TST is an elaborate put-on. There is a degree of smugness that accompanies this view: People who assert it imply they have “figured out the joke” and everyone else is still catching up to them. It’s true that TST began with a series of prank-like political actions. But this view assumes there is nothing to TST beyond what the media reports. They have no idea TST chapters all over the country are…

Israel’s Immigration Debate: “Where is the Jewish Spirit?”

By Mati Wagner

…mpact here. Waves of immigration, especially from countries conquered under 19th-century colonialism, have swept across Europe. With foreigners expected to become a majority in several of their cities, Europeans are undergoing a wrenching cultural soul-search. Doomsayers warn of the advent of Eurabia and the imminent demise of European culture. In the United States, meanwhile, a controversial immigration law granting law enforcement officers wider…

‘People You May Know’ Reveals a War on Democracy Being Waged With Big Data

By Chrissy Stroop

…n the UK. There’s a story that just broke in the past week. We have a track-and-trace system—it’s not working very well, but a track-and-trace system in Britain for COVID. And you go into a pub, and you have to download an app. You put your details in. And that’s fine, but the pub didn’t build the app, a third party built the app. And we’re now hearing people say that pubs and restaurants have been selling this data to data brokers. But I’ll bet y…

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 Lobby Supreme 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: I…

Why The Advocate‘s Choice of Pope Francis for Person of the Year is a Mistake

By Anthea Butler

…rank Schaefer of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, who has decided not to give up his United Methodist credentials for performing a same sex marriage ceremony of his son earlier this year. By refusing to give up his credentials, he is forcing the United Methodist church to perhaps take him to trial and strip him of his credentialing—simply because of his belief that the Methodist Book of Discipline is discriminatory. Rev. Schaefer is not just talking, but he…

‘We’re all in this together’: The Perils of Kumbaya Rhetoric

By Peter Laarman

…out eradicating it? These are questions that have answers, but the thoughts-and-prayers crowd won’t be asking them. Nor will the politically minded liberals who would have us believe that a “return to normal” with Joe Biden at the helm will make everything all hunky-dory again. Trump’s incompetence and malice—and the GOP’s connivance in all of it—have certainly made the pandemic worse than it needed to be. But the underlying structural problems an…

The Social Science Animal: Brooks Argues for Emotion over Reason

By Beatrice Marovich

…mboyant, decorous (and, indeed, sometimes long-winded) answers. Back in the 18th century Jean-Jacques Rousseau published a little book he called Émile: or, On Education. This treatise—whose utopian propositions would go on to inspire figures in both the French and American revolutions—was not modest about its aims. Rousseau promised to do nothing less than shape the very destiny and life journey of his human reader. “To live is the trade I will te…

Build the Muslim Community Center at Ground Zero

By Donna Schaper

…th respect and hope at its heart. What about forgiveness? It can be such a cheap word. It is obnoxious the way so many people tell other people they need to forgive the wrong done to them. Often those of us who advocate forgiveness don’t know what we are talking about. Then again, there is really no end to the suffering if we can’t forgive. There is no end game. We become hateful, the way our wrongdoers were hateful, and the victory goes to the te…