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A Peek Inside the ‘Onion’ of Scientology

By Kristin Rawls

…record. An auditor of Tom Cruise that I interviewed just quietly drifted away and was very eager to remain anonymous. A lot of others I talked to, though, similarly drifted away but did [ultimately]… go on the record about it. Do they get a disconnection letter? Not usually. To get a disconnection letter, they have to do something that makes the Church feel they deserve it. If they cause problems for the Church, or if the fact that they leave ca…

Good News: Religious Outreach Works On Vaccine Hesitancy. Bad News: We Need It.

By Daniel Schultz

…esults are encouraging, particularly in the big cities, but there’s a long way left to go. That long way left is bothersome, of course. Although the U.S. has crossed the 50% mark among adults, conventional wisdom is developing that the easy gets have been got. From here, it’s going to get progressively more difficult to get smaller and smaller segments of the population vaccinated. Already, there are some signs that it may be a struggle for church…

Hitchens Debates Conservative Evangelical: Nothing Happens

By Eric Reitan

…the effort to bring any human enterprise fully within such parameters is always ongoing, always a struggle, because human beings are finite and fallible creatures. In response to these ideas, I have been accused of “moving the goal posts”—more often than not in precisely those terms. The idea is that instead of trying to defend the goal that the new atheists are trying to score against, I’m standing on the sidelines defending the water cooler and…

By His Wounds We Have Already Been Entertained: Tiger Woods, The Masters, and the Ritual of Celebrity Disgrace

By Dan Mathewson and Trina Jones

…e inside, for many, he doesn’t entirely belong. And he doesn’t belong in a way that is different from the way Lee Elder, the first black person to compete for the Masters, didn’t belong, or the way Vijay Singh, another dark-skinned golfer to win the Masters, didn’t belong. For Tiger is, by many measures, the best golfer ever to play the game and has become the symbol for golf itself (thanks in large part to an early Nike ad campaign). When we, the…

RDPulpit: Obama Missed the Hope in State of the Union Address

By Daniel Schultz

…er we are assured God will not upset. Hope believes that there is a better way—or more precisely, that we can be led to a better way and receive the fulfillment of better promises than those made by a consumerist capitalist system. This hope is rooted in the covenantal relationship between God and people which resists the reduction of personhood to productivity or purchasing power. However, a prophetic response to the economy roots itself not in e…

Believing in Johnny Cash: An Open Letter to Atheists

By Paul Wallace

…ysics. These theories and disciplines are about the facts. Not in a simple way, granted, but in the same way that economics is about dollars and cents. The best science is securely grounded in empirical facts. So far as I can tell, (and again, addressing my atheist friends) the scientifically-motivated among you believe that, in the end, empirical facts are all the truth we can ever have. And this is so not because science is limited but because,…

Resisting the “New Normal” of Parasitic Capitalism in the Two Americas: The Religious Imperative

By Peter Laarman

…fy troubled mortgages or to start loaning to small business in any serious way: they are making their money the old-fashioned way—through usury and speculation. And they are very close to persuading a Democratic Congress to grant them even less transparency and even more opportunities for deceptive practices and the floating of future bubbles. Other state-favored economic sectors are also thriving. Big Insurance will be getting almost everything i…

The Church of Man-Love: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 7

By Mark Dery

…re to actually consume the love object. What more intimate and irrevocable way to have that faraway figure on the Jumbotron screen, the unattainable figment of a million fans’ fever dreams, all to oneself? The gonzo rock critic Lester Bangs winks at the inherent depravity of “psychofandom” in his gore-nographic fantasy of gobbling up a “giant rotten glob” of Elvis’s carcass in order to ingest the King’s magical powers: “I don’t need to go get The…

Were You Born Selfish?: An Interview with Frans de Waal

By Benjamin Hale

…corner and they don’t know how to get out of it, because we need to find a way of explaining where morality comes from. I think the way to do that is to return to Darwin. Darwin tried to place morality within human evolution. And that’s what I’m trying to do, at least with my primate studies. I’m trying to say, look at the behavior of other primates—there are enough indications that they have what Darwin would call the social instincts needed to g…

Original Spin: Progressives Dismiss Conservative Theology at Their Peril

By Ira Chernus

…with all its destructive effects, had to be held in check at all costs—one way or another. For Ike, one way was self-restraint, freely chosen by the masses; the other was social order, forcefully imposed by the authorities. In allowing for both alternatives, Ike showed himself to be neither Niebuhrian nor Anabaptist. He believed that the whole “city of man” and all its inhabitants could achieve self-restraint by proper exercise of their free will….