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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…

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…

How Not to Support Obamacare

By Peter Laarman

…ttle-discussed provision of the ACA, hospitals that serve disproportionate numbers of the urban poor are losing 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 likewi…

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

By Nicole Greenfield

…d stance” as “cheap grace,” Rev. Mark Creech of the Christian Action League attributed Bakker’s preaching of a “toxic and counterfeit gay-affirming gospel” to being injured by the church as a child. “In some ways he’s right,” Bakker told me in response. “It’s called empathy.” He continued: “Every time someone accuses me of cheap grace, I go back and say no, it’s free grace. Grace is free. The reason I understand the Bible the way I do is probably…

Hookers for Jesus: Sex and Salvation on the Strip

By Nicole Greenfield

…e confession cam setting that has come to define reality television. “Each time you do it, you want more. More of that rush, more of that crazy feeling.” Cue the music, cut to a close-up of a woman pulling on fishnets and fastening stilettos. “It’s suggestive.” She continues, fighting back tears and yelling: “It ain’t right. It’s not fair. It’s wrong. To sell sex with porn, and to get people addicted so that now guys have to act out their fantasy…

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…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…ooks is the hint that there is some profound reality underlying all of the cheap fun. Beneath the nonsensical lore and pseudoscience of The Lost Symbol is a sincere sense of hope. The narrator tells us that in the hours after the September 11 attacks, the random-event-generators in noetic scientists’ labs behaved unusually; “as the frightened world came together and focused in shared grief,” the machines’ random outputs became orderly and patterne…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…s of military thought today, perhaps religion served a similar function in times before. One needn’t look any further than the Psalms: “My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust… His faithfulness is a shield and buckler.” Martial imagery pervades religious writings from around the world, even if interpretation over time often renders it “just” metaphorical. Bousquet rightly warns us not to belittle metaphors; they “constitute a means of o…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…sumptions shattered. Bernard Lewis asked: ‘What went wrong?’ Dawkins is at best a meager echo of such sentiments. Because if we ask what went wrong in the Muslim world, we must ask what went wrong everywhere. Africa, the Americas, Australia, East Asia—all were colonized or otherwise interfered with. The few Muslim governments that attempted to beat the West at its own game were quickly invaded and, albeit with great difficulty, put down. Euthanize…

The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

By Maren Haynes

…“doing it right.” It’s clear in the song that Pigpen’s search for a viable number is, at best, a futile proposition. Still he dials the telephone operator to try find that lost landline. Problem is, he’s not even sure which direction she went. “I think she’s somewhere down south, down about Baton Rouge,” Pigpen begins, but then changes his mind. “She could be hangin’ round the steel mill, working in a house of blue lights, riding a getaway bus out…