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Mortal Combat: Risk in the Winter Olympics

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…he more poignant the ritual drama that unfolds, failures and all. In my first post prior to the outset of these Games, I tried to connect the Georgian luge athlete’s demise to the Greek ideals that birthed the ancient Games and inspired their Modern revival. On the face of it, that may seem a forced connection. The Winter Games seem hardly Greek at all. Modern Greece has never won a medal of any kind at the Winter Olympics; the country scarcely se…

Faith-Based Bailout

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…e president’s answer was truly mystifying: “democratic capitalism is the best system ever devised.” That’s a statement of faith, not a reflection on the future. Here yet again, the US president speaks as if there is no tomorrow, answering a question about the future with an expression of faith about the present. It’s not only vacuous; it’s dangerous. And there is the whole problem, the reason this proposal as currently presented cannot succeed. Th…

The Mouths of Babes

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…pening, nor how long it will last. We are truly in uncharted waters, the vast and unsteady sea of globalization. And no one—not the experts, and not even the most well established banks—trusts anyone else to tell them the truth. That’s why the Swiss opted out of principle, because they realize how close to the edge they have veered, too. Like seven year olds late for school, they suddenly and belatedly hear their alarm, awaken to the fact that “tr…

Greek Abbot Arrested for Role in Financial Scandal

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ing themselves to take back the position they lost two years ago when this story first came to light. It appears as if they may be trying to inoculate themselves against further scandal before they resume power by putting a priest on ice. It is obvious that the most visible religious institutions—from the Vatican, to Mount Athos, to the Southern Baptist Convention—are enormous bureaucracies virtually swimming in cash. Their relative immunity from…

Church Bloodies Berlusconi’s Nose?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…of invincibility. “The blood of the victor.” There is another symbolic twist to this strange tale, and it has not yet received the attention it deserves. By all accounts, the hurled object that did the damage was a metal miniature model of the great Cathedral in Milan (home to Da Vinci’s famous “Last Supper”). So the media mogul was undone, quite literally, by a church. If this is not to become the inspiration for yet another Dan Brown novel, the…

Famous Mormon Fictionalizes Life Stories

By Joanna Brooks

…a couple of those books, Dunn described how he had played baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals. That he’d pitched to Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams and rubbed elbows with Stan Musial. He also told stories about his service in World War II. He said that he was one of six soldiers out of his battalion of 1,000 to have survived the war. He said a buddy named Harold Lester Brown had died in his arms on Okinawa—prayers on his lips—and that Dunn himself…

Fearmongering? Yes, But the Fear is Here

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…u get first is an earful. In this sense, we may be seeing the cathartic first step in a long process that will have more substantive and productive results later on. Beneath the surface noise, then, I wonder if something of greater substance, and something of real importance, is trying to find expression. It has something to do with fear. It is telling that a debate about health has turned into a debate about death. That subtle shift is worth cons…

This is not a Religion Column: Biblical Capitalism

By Jeff Sharlet

…chman, the founder of the Moral Re-Armament movement—a network of upper crust Christian clubs—announced, “Human problems aren’t economic. They’re moral, and they can’t be solved by immoral measures.” He suggested instead “God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy.” Bruce Barton, a founder of advertising giant BBDO and the author of one of the 20th century’s bestsellers, The Man Nobody Knows (it was Jesus, whom Barton proposed a…

Christmas in Rome: Religion as an Aesthetic Phenomenon

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…tion in his final, peripatetic years. Or more specifically, to Rome at Christmastime. They are snapshots, images, that most endure at such a time: Wednesday noontime: While working in an old archive adjacent to the justly famous Chiesa Nuova (where several imposing scenes for Angels and Demons were shot last year), an elderly woman invites me to return that evening for a concert. The “concert,” such as it was, was a Catholic Mass distinguished by…

Is Bill Barr’s Belief in a Powerful President Actually Religious? A ‘High Papal’ Fable

By Ivan Strenski

…inners,’ the crucified Christ proclaimed that God sided with ‘losers.’ Christ, cast in his “loneliness and nakedness and persecution” paradoxically promised that through these sufferings the “savior had redeemed” humanity. In effect, “the new suffering Christ made Christians aware that God was closer to the weak and poor than to the mighty and rich”—a truly absurd notion to the worldly-wise at the time. Thus, around 400 CE, as “the tortured Jesus…