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Will a Video Game Make Sense of Qaddafi’s Death?

By Rachel Wagner

…late events like Qaddafi’s and bin Laden’s deaths into video games is also part of what we might call algorithmic sorting: the cultural attempt to simplify complex historical and social issues into patterns that we can recognize and make sense of. Typically, this is accomplished by vastly reducing the variables and historical contexts involved and effectively transforming lived events into games with predictable rules, defeatable “bad guys,” and t…

White House Position
on Exemption from Contraception Coverage
“Not a Done Deal”?

By Sarah Posner

…e Care Act, so they can decline to offer insurance that covers, free of co-pays, contraceptives for employees. The Bishops argue that such coverage violates their religious conscience. Yesterday I reported that pro-choice groups expected Obama to side with the Bishops, as does the anti-choice group Democrats for Life. When asked for comment on Jacobson’s report that the administration believes it “owes” the Bishops, a White House spokesperson dire…

The Many, Not the Few: An Anthem for Occupy

By Elizabeth Drescher

…e a video of the performance, despite a Secret Service prohibition on cell phones, because Makana’s guitar is tuned with a smartphone app. Or, reporters are interested in how Obama, his guests, and security detail responded—or didn’t, as it turned out. But this misses the heart of the story, as Makana’s set at the APEC dinner was less dissenting performance than performative utterance—the songs he played, the protest t-shirt hidden beneath the com…

Is Herman Cain’s Long-Running Minstrel Show Finally at an End?

By Anthea Butler

…stors had to leave their denominations/churches to continue; but the black pastors did not. Pastor Cain knows this fact well from his Baptist background. The mistake he is making, however, is two-fold: believing that he can lie his way through this, sacrificing his family on the altar of his hubris. Even Gingrich knows how to pull a repentant face when questioned about his past affairs. But Cain’s arrogance won’t wash with the many white voters wh…

Missouri Pastor Goes Viral on Gawker: ‘Separation of Church and Hate’

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…e’s business to determine what a sacrament is? I believe not only in the separation of church and hate, but also in the separation of church and state. What were you doing when you found out the speech had gone viral, and what has been the most surprising thing about the reaction? I was having dinner with my family and my phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. To be honest—as lame as this might sound—the most surprising part of all this craziness was how qu…

Bishop Minerva Carcaño Has a Nearly Impossible Job

By Mary E. Hunt

…ed bishop was part of that ceremony. Bishop Carcaño did not feel she could participate in the CWAC ordinations in her region. She was involved in discussion about whether a local church could be used for the service and whether local clergy ought to participate. There are differing perceptions about whether she instructed local pastors not to allow the ordination service to be held in local churches. It is hard to know all that went on behind the…

A Valentine for the World…and for the Church I Left

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…students’ papers who give me guided tours of the Roman Road in 2.5 double-spaced pages of eighteen-year-old certainty parroting their parents and their youth pastors, and I know they are “giving testimony” in these papers, a light in the darkness, planting seed that will either spring up or it won’t, but they at least they have done their part to reach the apparently pagan professor. And I do hear His voice sometimes. Really, I do. And, my dear be…

“Guerilla Warrior of Judeo-Christian Political Commentary” Stars in Anti-Newt Video in Iowa

By Sarah Posner

…Jan. 3. That endorsement? A merger of Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann. Pastor Gordon, who previously supported former Ten Commandments judge Roy Moore before his presidential campaign fizzled, adds, “many Iowa conservatives don’t care who’s on top.” Update: Via Brian Tashman, some more background on Molotov: @sarahposner Molotov also made anti-choice terrorist movie bit.ly/j3zQlw & backed Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill youtube.com/watch?v=Em…

Joyless Primaries Grind On

By Joanna Brooks

…al Christians continue to opt for Santorum as the not-Romney, there is little solid data that isolates anti-Mormonism as the cause: region, social conservatism, and economic class also drive the narrative. As the race moves past Super Tuesday, the real story is the grind that the 2012 race is becoming. Its dispiriting effects on voters. The distorting effects of Super PAC cash. And the fact that we’re in it for the long haul. Like it, or not….

Is Pro-Life Cause Célèbre Chen Guangcheng Actually Pro-Life?

By Lindsay Beyerstein

…China’s coercive population control regime: “Earlier this year American taxpayers funneled $35 mill to UNFPA, an outfit that supports policies Chen has sacrificed his safety fighting,” tweeted Family Research Council president Tony Perkins on April 30. Hoffman’s op-ed combines two common narratives about Chen and the Obama administration that have become popular on anti-abortion websites; that the Obama administration has betrayed Chen because it…