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Religion, Morality, and the Death of the American Soap Opera

…undermining the war morale, distracting women with addictive stories that promoted destructive values. To label something a “soap opera” today still implies that what you are describing involves immature behavior, improbable plot twists, and/or unseemly sexual liaisons. Soap opera fans themselves have consistently been characterized as immature, psychologically weak, or missing something crucial in their lives. As a result, those who watch soaps…

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What Can Ancient India Tell Us About Our World?

…lya struggled in sophisticated ways with the issues that bedevil our world today: What is the role of ethics in the economy and management of the state? To what extent can we practice non-violence in international relations? Is it possible to reconcile a realist approach to politics with ethical values? Ashoka and Kautilya also undertook practical measures which even today have something to teach us. Both advocated the establishment of extensive n…

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As Florida Attempts to Make it Illegal, an Argument for the Sacred Work of White Discomfort

…021, 9 states had passed and 20 states had introduced bills that are being promoted as banning CRT. Part of the answer lies in the unique cultural moment we are inhabiting as a country. As I argued in my 2016 book, The End of White Christian America, the visceral nature of today’s white conservative politics is driven by its desperate need for new mechanisms for ensuring white supremacy amid America’s changing demographics, particularly the loss o…

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Savoring the Haterade: Why Jews Love Dara Horn’s ‘People Love Dead Jews’

…hem—but because the project itself speaks to a deep-seated problem of Jews today: the most successful way to convince someone to be a Jew is to tell them that everyone hates them, promoting a kind of Negative Judaism. Looking at the world through tear-streaked glasses I want to address this problem by making three points. The first is that Horn’s book is really part of a new genre one might call, “Anti-antisemitism literature.” These works mostly…

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Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism is More Kosher Than You Think

…e only relevant for their own time, this would mean none of it is relevant today. It’s only the continuing relevance of the whole Bible, including the curses, that would give modern Israel a claim to ancient roots. The “settler colonialist” critique is that today’s Israel is less an offshoot of ancient history and more a modern project made possible by Western European empires. Without the direct relevance of the Bible, that’s harder to deny. Yet…

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Obama at Romero’s Tomb: The Politics of Liberation

…violence, figures like Romero give us hope. As Romero prophetically stated, “I should tell you that, as a Christian, I don’t believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.” The Salvadoran people today, the Catholic Church as a whole, and all who stand as defenders of human rights and denounce injustice should take after Obama and spend a moment remembering this modern-day martyr who did not…

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Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus?

…edieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. A binding might include a bit of Chaucer—something from the life of St. Bridget, perhaps—and part of an almanac, or a treatise on herbal remedies. They were mash-ups, that is. Or, to borrow terminology from George P. Landow, they were “dispersed texts,” unburdened by the modern fiction of sequential ordering of thought as “natural” or unitary authorship as normative…

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Who’s Smearing Obama?

…ght reasonably ask, of course, if there is so much awareness among Muslims today that this draconian punishment is out of context in modern society, why is the penalty still on the books? Why haven’t Muslims gotten with the program like everybody else and unreservedly embraced religious freedom? There are, alas, no simple answers. If pressed I’d likely point out that the wheels of theological reform often turn at a glacial pace; or that Muslims ar…

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Is America Willing to Be Freed from Its Demons?

…s our enemies, and the latter constructs a false sense of independence and freedom.” I don’t know if we Americans, especially Christians in America, want to be freed from our demons. The late New Testament scholar Walter Wink defined the demonic as an array of human and supra-human forces aligned to destroy life. The demonic was both individual and structural, personal and collective, sentient and mechanical. Wink’s expansive way of writing about…

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Krapp’s Last Tweet: The Rise (and Fall?) of Privilege in the Digital Economy

…with cyberspace integrated the spirit of American exceptionalism, faith in free markets, and a view of computer networks as nature’s next evolutionary leap. Together they enacted the game-changing Telecommunications Act of 1996, which laid the foundations for the industry giants of subsequent decades. On Tailspins and Technical Leaps of Faith The celebratory entrance of technical and political elites into the so-called New Economy constituted a le…

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