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Celebrate Jesus with Weird Merchandise!

By Gwynne Watkins

…ology 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 contains a small section dedicated to Jesus merchandise, which results in some odd juxtapositions. Here, for example, are the current most popular category themes on the OTC website: …

Are American Christians “Persecuted”?

By Eric C. Miller

…rvative, calls the incident “a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like.” Coming from Dreher, for whom the future of American Christianity looks increasingly ominous, the line is sobering in itself. But he goes on: Yet it is also the kind of thing that people in this country who fear and loathe Christians point to as an argument-ender when Christians complain about social injustice against themselves, e.g., “Get back to me when they’r…

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

By Peter Laarman

I had to read Brooks’ column on Laudato si a couple of times to realize fully what a risk-taker he is to put this stuff out there, apodictically as it were, without pausing to consider whether Francis might have very good and very Christian reasons to believe that, Brooks puts it, “arrangements based on self-interest and competition are inherently destructive.” Brooks clearly admires Francis as the very model of a “good person” and “one of the wo…

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…oast’s first for-profit meditation studio. As a cynic might point out, it looks an awful lot like a privatized temple—a sangha with a profit motive; dharma for dollars. The company does not phrase its mission in quite those terms. “MNDFL exists to enable humans to feel good,” the website explains. In its DNA, the company is one half executive, one half spiritual. Burrows is a film executive-turned-life coach-turned-“spiritual tourist,” while Rinzl…

“Reconciliation” With Indigenous People is Comforting For Many Canadians, But is a Christian Concept Up To The Task?

By Pamela Klassen and Joseph Wiebe

…ns. In the past month, however, Canadians who follow the news have had to look their own racism, sexism, and criminality straight in the eye. In the space of two weeks in February 2018, two juries acquitted white men accused of murdering young Indigenous people, raising charges of systemic injustice from Indigenous communities and their settler allies. In 2016, Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old from Red Pheasant First Nation, was shot in back of the h…

Updated: My Work on Confederate Monuments Leaves This Christian Ethicist Distrustful of Calls for Reconciliation and Healing

By Ryan Andrew Newson

…tening the safety of elected officials, and waving a Confederate flag for good measure. In response, President Trump repeated his false claims of election fraud, calling the insurrectionists “very special” and saying to them, “We love you.” President-Elect Biden’s response was impassioned, and rightly condemned the seditious assault on the Capitol, but it was also inadequate precisely because he continued to trade in language that fits with easy c…

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

By Nicole Greenfield

…ered in Durham, North Carolina a couple weeks ago. Bakker, pastor of the Brooklyn-based Revolution NYC, had traveled south to his home state—the state that, decades ago, witnessed firsthand the rise, and then the fall, of his televangelist parents’ PTL ministry—to speak out against a ballot initiative up for vote tomorrow. If passed, Amendment 1 would modify North Carolina’s constitution to declare “marriage between one man and one woman” as “the…

The Economy is Racism: Ending Race-Based Economic Violence is the Real Challenge of This Moment

By Peter Laarman

…e central role in the post-Covid world. If the real economy of the future looks grim for the vast majority of Americans—i.e., for those who aren’t significantly invested in stocks and bonds—Wall Street isn’t worried. The smart money predicts that corporate profits will do just fine as jobs are further degraded in a variety of ways. As mentioned, investors are perfectly fine with the increasing power of the Big Five tech giants; they like what can…

Who’s to Blame for BP?

By David True

…hat BP actually cleans up its mess? The federal government, of course. In coordination with many partners, it is the ultimate guarantor that BP will make good on its promise to restore environments, businesses, and individuals. There’s a second irony to the “accidents happen” interpretation; that this is precisely what the libertarian theory of Paul and Perry seems to deny about individuals. If someone is poor, it seems to follow necessarily that…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…agine a grown man allowing himself to be blindfolded, led into a darkened room, threatened and ritually attacked by three men wearing aprons, pulled to the floor, and left there with a cloth over his head for an hour or more before he is allowed to see light again. It might be even harder to imagine Ben Franklin submitting to these indignities. Or George Washington. Or Theodore or Franklin Roosevelt. But all of them did, along with eleven other pr…