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Religion, Morality, and the Death of the American Soap Opera

By Katy E. Shrout

…undermining the war morale, distracting women with addictive stories that promoted destructive values. To label something a “soap opera” today still implies that what you are describing involves immature behavior, improbable plot twists, and/or unseemly sexual liaisons. Soap opera fans themselves have consistently been characterized as immature, psychologically weak, or missing something crucial in their lives. As a result, those who watch soaps…

Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…edieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. A binding might include a bit of Chaucer—something from the life of St. Bridget, perhaps—and part of an almanac, or a treatise on herbal remedies. They were mash-ups, that is. Or, to borrow terminology from George P. Landow, they were “dispersed texts,” unburdened by the modern fiction of sequential ordering of thought as “natural” or unitary authorship as normative…

Undercover Bosses as Minor Divinities: What Ever Happened to ‘Take this Job and Shove It’?

By Peter Laarman

…cknowledged the reality of great wealth but were less inclined than people today to view the possession of wealth as particularly virtuous. One might say that popular culture today has raised the assigned social value of wealth—or has valorized it, to use the old Marxist term. Parallel to this valorization is the relatively new and completely unrealistic expectation on the part of people with bupkes that they might suddenly be the possessors of gr…

Monstrous Futures: Dungeons & Dragons, Harbinger of the “None” Generation, Turns 40

By Robert M. Geraci

…lity, but a dive into progressive dreams about what the world ought to be. Today’s media marketplace was constructed on a scaffold of adventures, role-played in the depths of the night, fueled by pizza, soda, and dreams. Today’s videogames are the highest grossing entertainment medium in the world, and they are the direct descendants of D&D. These digital worlds populated by monsters and magic were made possible by The Monster Manual. That volume,…

Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism is More Kosher Than You Think

By Seth Sanders

…e only relevant for their own time, this would mean none of it is relevant today. It’s only the continuing relevance of the whole Bible, including the curses, that would give modern Israel a claim to ancient roots. The “settler colonialist” critique is that today’s Israel is less an offshoot of ancient history and more a modern project made possible by Western European empires. Without the direct relevance of the Bible, that’s harder to deny. Yet…

Interview with Karen Armstrong

By Andrea Bistrich

…gton introduced the theory of a “clash of civilizations” we are witnessing today. Does such a fundamental incompatibility between the “Christian West” and the “Muslim World” indeed exist? The divisions in our world are not the result of religion or of culture, but are politically-based. There is an imbalance of power in the world, and the powerless are beginning to challenge the hegemony of the Great Powers, declaring their independence of them; o…

What Can Ancient India Tell Us About Our World?

By Bruce Rich

…lya struggled in sophisticated ways with the issues that bedevil our world today: What is the role of ethics in the economy and management of the state? To what extent can we practice non-violence in international relations? Is it possible to reconcile a realist approach to politics with ethical values? Ashoka and Kautilya also undertook practical measures which even today have something to teach us. Both advocated the establishment of extensive n…

Who’s Smearing Obama?

By Svend White

…deration of Abu Hanifah (d. 767 CE) and the Hanafi school that he founded (today’s largest). In Tolerance and Coercion in Islam, Yohanan Friedmann shows how Abu Hanifah and his followers discouraged executions in practice by ruling that it was mandatory to make an attempt to induce apostates to recant before carrying out any sentence—others considered this process, called istitaba, optional—and in other cases scholars went so far as to for all pra…

Obama at Romero’s Tomb: The Politics of Liberation

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…violence, figures like Romero give us hope. As Romero prophetically stated, “I should tell you that, as a Christian, I don’t believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.” The Salvadoran people today, the Catholic Church as a whole, and all who stand as defenders of human rights and denounce injustice should take after Obama and spend a moment remembering this modern-day martyr who did not…

Savoring the Haterade: Why Jews Love Dara Horn’s ‘People Love Dead Jews’

By Shaul Magid

…them in Israel—it really doesn’t matter. And thus even those “people” who today “love” Israel will eventually prefer to see them dead. In short, as Horn sees the world, Zionism is ironically a failure. Fear is the new middlebrow The third point takes us back to the middle of the twentieth century, just after the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust. As Rachel Gordan has recently and persuasively shown, in those decades there were a pleth…