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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…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…sle. Nevertheless, his ambition outstretches any run-of-the-mill author of cheap thrillers. For better or worse, after two runaway bestsellers that claim to upend the traditional story of Christianity, he has become America’s most important pop philosopher and historian. In the earlier books, he hatched a version of the faith that spoke to many people in ways that churches no longer seem able to. Now, by turning to Freemasonry in The Lost Symbol,…

Who’s to Blame for BP?

By David True

…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…

Discrimination on the Taxpayer’s Dime? The Fight To Curtail the Overreach of RFRA

By Sarah Posner

…needed—and are entitled to under a 1997 settlement agreement in Flores v. Reno, which requires, among other things, that these children have access to family planning services. In the ACLU’s lawsuit against HHS, the USCCB asserted in a sworn affidavit that it did not refer these minors in its custody for services that it objected to on religious grounds, like contraception and abortion. In responses to my inquiries, HHS maintained it was ensuring…

Cruz Brings GOP Nomination into the Toilet

By Patricia Miller

…aintain rules about gender and sexuality was largely unquestioned. As R.R. Reno charges in First Things, these rules about “gender roles and other foundational categories” were what “ordinary people use to orient themselves and make sense out of their lives,” but now the “transgender revolution” is dismantling these rules as part of an effort to “efface the social authority of the male-female difference.” But this discomfort, no matter how acutely…

The Sacred and the Dead: ‘Friend of the Devil’ is a Love Song

By Pitman B. Potter

“I lit out from Reno I was trailed by 20 hounds, Didn’t get to sleep that night till the morning came around. Set out running but I take my time, A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine. If I get home before daylight, Just might get some sleep tonight.…” ~ “Friend of the Devil” Despite its provocative title, the Grateful Dead’s song “Friend of the Devil” actually can be heard as an invitation to listeners to consider the classic theological the…

Does Traditional Christian Marriage Just Mean “Not Gay”?

By Daniel Silliman

…rofit corporation that performs marriages and think, as First Things’ R.R. Reno does, that the fulminations about attacks on religious liberty are a bit overblown. Aside from the legal and political questions, though, the case of the Knapps and the Hitching Post presents a good example of how the fight to defend marriage from “redefinition” can result in emptying the definition of most of its content. This is a fight about the meaning of marriage,…

Burning Man in the Age of Rick Perry: Revelation, Pluralism, and Moral Imperative

By Jay Michaelson

…ination than a pretext for the journey. These days, of course, flying into Reno isn’t so hard—but actually opening up to whatever Black Rock City has to offer… that journey can be arduous. If you go looking for a festival with sex and drugs and dance music, that is all you will find. But if you pause to wonder why there’s a temple in the middle of it, why people come back year after year even if they don’t do drugs, or, for that matter, how it is…

ESPN Commentator says BYU Not Guilty of “Institutional Racism”

By Joanna Brooks

…ode: “If Darron Smith wasn’t so hell bent on exposing BYU, the Church and the honor code office as racists, he’d find out that for every Thomas Stancil, Tico Pringle and Ray Hudson, there’s a Brandon Davies, Reno Mahe and Brian McDonald, the latter of which recovered from an alcohol-related probation, joined the Church and served a mission to Washington, DC.” Sikahema’s full essay appears here….

Young Imam Reality Show, Debating Secularism, and More

By Michael J. Altman

…r keeps up his evangelical crusade to go green. But at First Things, R. R. Reno asks, why all this evangelical fuss now? And what is especially Christian about Christian ecology? Lauri Lebo points out that not everyone involved in the cleanup is an evangelical Christian. Some of them just used to be. Malaysia is abuzz about the new hit reality series Young Imam. The winner of the show gets a scholarship, a job at a Kuala Lampur mosque, and a free…