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The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

By Kaya Oakes

…Sufi, you don’t see what’s around you at the moment. The contextual misogyny endemic to almost any music of the ’60s drops away. You don’t see tie dye, or skulls, or swirling skirts. You see a vision of something else. Sufi Dervishes spin to “testify to God’s existence, unity, majesty and power.” Deadheads spin to see what they can of Utopia, Heaven, Paradise. Punks don’t spin, they mosh, but Greg Ginn from the seminal punk band Black Flag admits…

Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

By Kathryn Joyce

…d, can transform the procedure into a two-day commitment—prohibitive for many lower-income women with inflexible jobs. Burkhart recounts phone calls she’s received from local ministers counseling young women who are desperate to find out where they can go. Burkhart began working for Dr. Tiller in 2002, when she joined his staff as a spokesperson and a political advocate, working on a political action committee they established to lobby the state g…

Death in the Desert: Riding With the Samaritans

By Lauri Lebo

…mountains and deserts. Which is why, Father David and Millsap believe, the number of deaths have climbed this past year. Many of the bodies are too decomposed or mutilated by animals to ever be identified. Kat Rodriguez of Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, a nonprofit advocacy organization which collects data on the deaths, says she gets calls all the time from desperate people looking for loved ones who had crossed the border. Recently she spoke wit…

Hookers for Jesus: Sex and Salvation on the Strip

By Nicole Greenfield

…also embraced a limited interpretation of victims as women and children. Many see this effort, and particularly the religious right’s leadership on the issue, as enabling a moral crusade. “They’re not trying to liberate women, or trying to let them control their own destiny,” Chip Berlet at Political Research Associates, a nonprofit that tracks right-wing networks, commented. “They’re trying to stop women from sinning.” It is important to note, ho…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…etary of defense between 1961 and 1968, was perhaps more responsible than anyone for making “systems analysis” into the Pentagon credo. “Don’t give me your poetry,” he once retorted to a White House aide’s dour assessment of the war in Vietnam. “Give me something I can put in the computer.” But cybernetics didn’t do much good in a war where there was no clear line between enemy and friend. During a supposedly limited war, more bombs fell from Amer…

NC’s Gay Marriage Ban: “It’s Going to Hurt the Church”

By Nicole Greenfield

…at in the long run it’s going to hurt the church, and shrink the church in numbers. We’re supposed to be known for our love for one another, and for our compassion, and this is just not it.” Many younger Christian communities around the country would agree with Bakker, and have adopted the kind of positive, inclusive messages he refers to, marking a definitive shift away from the type of pro-Amendment 1 voices heard in the debate. But—unlike Bakke…

How Not to Support Obamacare

By Peter Laarman

…ng their subsidies. But for Obama not to stand his ground and say that the cheap, low-level policies that many healthy people now have should be cancelled for the sake of the common good: that’s just inexcusable. On the other hand, he’s not getting a lot of help from his Democratic “friends” on this one, and for the same reason: They likewise don’t know how to speak ethically. Thus, Obama special friend Bill Clinton: “I personally believe, even if…

Celebrate Jesus with Weird Merchandise!

By Gwynne Watkins

…tween the bunnies-and-eggs version of Easter, and the church-service version. Merchandisers are wise to define Easter by marshmallow chicks and colorful baskets, rather than bring theology into it. But there are always exceptions. One is the Oriental Trading Company. Founded to create cheap plastic toys for carnivals, OTC is now a leading supplier of cheap plastic stuff for church groups and Christian schools. Their party supply catalog always con…

Are American Christians “Persecuted”?

By Eric C. Miller

…he Christian community with the gay community discloses a head-spinning irony. In acknowledging that gays in the US have a legitimate grievance about their systematic discrimination, Dreher tacitly renounces any role in the struggle they face. Meanwhile, his own claim to discrimination depends specifically upon the maintenance of discrimination against gays. Here, too, clearer definitions of persecuted and persecutor seem appropriate. As they cont…

Memo to David Brooks: Francis Is Not Naïve For Criticizing Capitalism

By Peter Laarman

…credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign energy sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or perhap…