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New Research May Explain the Weakness of Centrism and the Religious Left

By Daniel Schultz

…two sprawling coalitions that fear and loathe the other, and the side that best taps into that existential ego threat is likely to come out on top. Bitecofer’s not necessarily right, and she is only one voice among many in the complex conversation of election nerdery. But her views seems intuitively right to anyone coming out of left-blogdom in the last fifteen years, as I do. What we cynics have seen time after time is Republicans playing the fea…

Jesus’ Language More Complicated Than Experts Claim

By Seth Sanders

…bbouni “is, in fact, excellent Mishnaic Hebrew” because “It is attested in Codex Kaufmann of Mishna Ta`anit 3.8.” This sounds impressive until one actually reads Codex Kaufmann, a priceless source for early Rabbinic Hebrew. What Buth neglects to mention is that this form appears only once, as opposed to over 50 instances of the normal Hebrew forms “rab” or “rabbi.” He also doesn’t mention that, by contrast, this Aramaic term for “lord” is overwhel…

Polygamy, Genius, and the Origin of Religion

By Michael Schulson

…. In that light, an argument like Barash’s sounds hopelessly retrograde at best, and intolerant at worst. But just because a question is uncomfortable doesn’t mean that it should be taboo. Evolution clearly made male and female bodies different. Human brains are subject to evolution, too. It’s possible that natural selection has encoded different behavior patterns in men and women. These differences could show up in proclivities toward certain beh…

An Interview with Rep. Jamie Raskin on the Feminist and Abolitionist Founder Who Has Slipped into a Memory Hole

By Andrew L. Seidel

…lavery that the Jeffersonians forgive.” In other words, Paine embodied the best of both men and, remarkably, without the serious historical baggage nearly all in the founding generation carry. Raskin speaks with his customary brilliance and fire, but there’s an undeniably genuine admiration that leads me to ask “How much do you love Thomas Paine?” “We named our son after him, Tommy,” Raskin begins and the conversation becomes deeply personal. In h…

In the Church of Lincoln

By Michael A. Elliott

…that Lincoln was, first and last, a cutthroat pol who could spin with the best of them. The most egregious sinners on this score, Wilentz writes, are the literary scholars who seek an aesthetic Lincoln, a philosopher-king of ideological purity. Since they can’t read history properly, these wordhounds proceed to make a series of fallacious judgments, often deeming Lincoln wanting in comparison to more doctrinaire abolitionists. If you think Henry…

Mitt Romney Plays the Tin Man at the NAACP Convention

By Anthea Butler

…ere possible to fully communicate what I believe is in the real, enduring, best interest of African-American families, you would vote for me for president.” Well, Mitt, we really don’t understand who you truly are in your heart. You don’t know how to show us what’s really there. And If you can’t fully communicate what you believe is best for African Americans at the NAACP convention, you can’t do it anywhere. So what was this speech about? I belie…

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

By Ivan Strenski

…be just an intelligent and readable history of Christianity—Tom Holland’s best-selling Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (2019). Far from being a ‘plain vanilla’ history of Christianity, I would argue that Holland, like Barr, offers a ‘high papal’ vision of the way things have been and should be. In his latest book Tom Holland serves up an example of a literature affirming Europe’s ‘deep Christianity,’ though tilted very muc…

RDPulpit: Rick Warren and the Limits of Empathy

By Tom Davis

…celebrity and the moniker “America’s Pastor,” are largely the product of a best-selling self-help devotional, The Purpose Driven Life. Stunning skeptical publishers, the book has sold 25 million copies and is, according to Publisher’s Weekly, the best selling hardback in American history. Revenue from the book has enabled Warren to stop drawing a salary and to refund the 25 years of salary he’d already drawn. Furthermore, the huge sums that contin…

COVID-Denying Father Sergei is Just the Latest Example of the Russian Orthodox Church’s ‘Holy Man’ Problem

By Katherine Kelaidis

…n Vladimir Putin has his own renegade holy man. The spiritual father knows best The trouble arises from what’s actually one of the more humane and helpful customs of Orthodox Christianity: the spiritual father. (There are technically spiritual mothers as well, but the exclusion of women from the ordained clergy has historically kept their numbers small.) Deriving from the ancient Egyptian monastic tradition (the oldest in the Christian world), it’…

“My Scientology Movie” Pokes the Hornet’s Nest

By Gordon Haber

…sts. My Scientology Movie is the latest from Louis Theroux, who is perhaps best known for his BBC documentaries about fringe groups like black nationalists and ultra-Zionists. Theroux’s work is ostensibly about investigating and perhaps humanizing extremism. But more often it exemplifies a kind of deadpan eccentricity-tourism associated with another British journo-entertainer, Jon Ronson. Both Ronson and Theroux specialize in pretending to take cr…