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Challenging Plantation Capitalism: Rev. Barber’s Holy Cause

By Tefere Gebre

…ities, indeed. America’s labor movement once showed the world that working class people could lead middle class lives. But in our lifetime we have become among the world’s most unequal societies, with an economy defined by wage stagnation. Close and sober analysis shows that the key political and economic driver of this sinister transformation has been the continued power of those who are still able to maintain plantation capitalism in the South w…

When Children’s Literature is Not Defined by “Innocence”

By Jodi Eichler-Levine

…or twice. In a memoir you can’t do that. It’s also an amazing text in the classroom. I taught it in my “Women and Religion” course this spring and students reacted so viscerally and also so thoughtfully. So many Americans take religion as an “either/or” proposition. For my class, this book brought home the struggle at the heart of religious experiences. That’s an old thing, but it gets lost in our national conversations. It’s so hard to mention o…

Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World

By Bruce Wilson

…ories of Christianity zoom from the left onto Peter Wagner’s huge blue WLI classroom screen, bouncing slightly for effect as they hit the right edge of the screen before rebounding to center. There’s one little block of 20 million or so, explains Wagner, which includes Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. He typically just ignores this block in his presentations, explains Wagner, because they’re “cultic.” The biggest megablock outside of the Catholic…

Why All the Silly Devil Talk Should be Taken Seriously

By Ebony Utley

…rofessor Griff. If we look at this through the lenses of race, gender, and class identity in the U.S., we begin to see that it is no accident that talented, powerful, popular, and rich African American male rappers, along with female artists, are being targeted by these claims. There is no better way to temper black men’s influence on tween and teen audiences, for example, than by claiming they are evil. (MC Hammer is himself black, but he seems h…

Reports of the Black Church’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated: A Review of Walter Fluker’s Latest Book

By Joseph Winters

…e. But it seems that some questions still need to be raised. How much does class determine how frequently and intensely one has to confront police surveillance? How is anti-blackness mediated by other subject positions and power relationships? While Fluker acknowledges the intersectionality between race, class, gender, and sexuality, why does he privilege blackness and maleness in the penultimate chapter—a hoary tendency that was replicated in Oba…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…who say, ‘Creationism and intelligent design belong in history or religion class, but in my classroom I only teach science. Besides, I’ve got too much information to cover as it is.’ And there’s the rub: science is taught simply as information, as a collection of facts, and as if these facts exist in an ethical vacuum not connected to young Americans’ lives. Not only is this false, but it sets up a tension, a conundrum for these folks living in th…

State of the Union Stuck in that Olde-Time Semi-Niebuhrianism

By Ira Chernus

…classless society. Other nations are still caught in the snares of age-old class conflict while we have only the one great class: the middle. That economic fiction has always gone hand-in-hand with the theological concept of “original sinlessness.” We bear no guilt because there has been, and still is, so little economic oppression (none at all, some have always maintained); we bear no burden of past strife because the past has been so harmonious….

The Birth of Un-Cool: How Disgusted Liberals Became Neoconservatives

By Michelle Goldberg

…ason in which alienated, politically committed members of the upper-middle class imagined some commonality between their own aspirations and those of, say, black nationalists or the countercultural avant-garde. Tom Wolfe’s famous New York magazine piece, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” a vivisection of a fundraiser for the Black Panthers held by composer Leonard Bernstein, captured the zeitgeist the emerging neoconservatives were reacting a…

A Life After Death Double-Feature: Eastwood’s Hereafter and Noe’s Enter the Void

By Jay Michaelson

…drugs and prostitution, whereas the characters in Hereafter live in upper-class Paris, middle-class San Francisco, and the most caring and engaged child welfare system the world has ever known. But the differences are more than skin-deep, especially when it comes to religion. Hereafter goes out of its way to demean traditional religion (and esoteric nonsense) en route to its reluctant affirmation of the afterlife—if the film were a person, she’d…

Creationist Rumblings in Louisiana

By Lauri Lebo

…can present what she termed “critical thinking and creationism” in science classes. Board Member David Tate quickly responded: “We let them teach evolution to our children, but I think all of us sitting up here on this School Board believe in creationism. Why can’t we get someone with religious beliefs to teach creationism?” Whether anything will come of the discussion remains to be seen. For now, the board appears supportive, but non-committal: W…