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The Sacramental American Day of Thanks

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…namely that, running parallel to whatever specific traditional commitment most Americans claimed, there was a genuinely independent religious tradition in which all citizens of the United States participated. This was what Bellah called the American civil religion. The matter of parallelism was important; here was an independent tradition that did not touch the particular commitments of particular religious traditions like Christianity, Buddhism…

Possibility that Bachmann Believes in Wifely Submission Irrelevant?

By Julie Ingersoll

…e Christians embrace what is often called “mutual submission,” in no way demonstrates that other conservative Christians don’t still promote a patriarchal theology in which women’s roles are still limited to “helpmeet;” a patriarchal theology which many have experienced as destructive and abusive. As I wrote here on RD after that debate: In the conservative Christian world there is a spectrum of views on how these texts (the biblical texts concer…

Darwin in Rome: Burden of Diversity, Mystery of Time

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…Forum. On the Saturday afternoon of my visit, the exhibit was crammed with mostly Italian spectators, including schoolchildren on tour with teachers. The place was abuzz with activity and close crowds. The younger children were drawn to the terrariums full of turtles, snakes, and other curiosities; adults were partial to both the reproduction of Darwin’s private study, where the book that rocked the world was written, and the final room in which t…

Blue Jean Revolution

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…idealism could not survive the Stalinist reality On thing that struck her most on these trips was that the symbol du jour was the blue jean. Of all things, the blue jean. While begging was strictly forbidden and harshly punished in Moscow, people would approach her and offer to buy the jeans right off her legs. But why? Partly because they were forbidden and impossible to get. If you tell a human being not to eat of the fruit of a tree, you shoul…

Conservative Christians Say it’s Okay to Vote for Romney Despite Doctrine

By Joanna Brooks

…the Christian Right had gathered up and burned all the copies of the anti-Mormon movie The Godmakers they used to screen in their Sunday Schools. Or that they all chipped in for a Jesus fish to affix to the tail end of Romney’s presidential candidate motorcade. But if you think what they offered Romney was a welcome to the league of Christian gentlemen, you should really read the letter for yourself. Here’s the opening paragraph: In this electi…

Papal Profanity: The Vatican’s Pagan Museum

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ture garden at a place called the Belvedere. It was utterly private, since most Church elites believed that they understood how to view such things, but that the “hoi polloi” might be confused or, God help them, tempted by such pagan visual forms. Some pretty clear evidence for the edginess of the whole thing comes less than fifty years later when the last non-Italian pope until John Paul II, a Dutch pope (Adrian VI), came to Rome for the first ti…

For Saturn’s Sake, Remember the Dead

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…We’ve probably all heard that this festival was the real precursor to Christian Christmas, with its funny inversion of social roles, the masters serving meals to slaves, the eating, the drinking, the gift-giving, the general merriment. Saturday is still Saturn’s day in English, and we all know that his day (or rather, his night) is set aside especially for the parties. But all this playful artifice had a very serious underside, a brooding quality…

Still Captivated by Southern Gospel

By Douglas Harrison

…this capaciously graceful, wide-stride gospel church-lady style that was almo*]}*st completely improvisational and entirely intuitive, and it mesmerized me from my earliest recollections. I’m not sure what Maude or Maxine would make of the book, but both of these women, I now realize, were galvanizing examples for me of gospel’s open-hearted sensibility and the way it dispenses with the confinements of the notated score or the precisely placed arrang…

Justice v. Revenge: The Question Beneath the Question of Prison Reform

By Xarissa Holdaway

…well, forgiving and just. So why do correctional institutions remain, for most inmates and in most places, not only punitive, but often arbitrarily and unfairly so? Perhaps we’re not so interested in rehabilitation after all. Patrick J. Nolan, the former Republican leader in the assembly in California, who served time after being caught in an FBI sting known as “Shrimpscam,” said to PBS NewsHour, “I think we have incarcerated a lot of people we’r…

Pakistan and Iran, a War on Two Fronts

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…It was his simplistic assessment of the current situation in Gaza that was most striking, however, and worrisome. The situation is simple for Bush; it always has been. Israel’s battle is America’s battle, and vice versa. It is framed as a battle of Israeli democracy against the anti-democratic forces surrounding her, and it is thus another front in the War on Terror that has always had a theological echo in this president’s biblicist mind. There c…