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The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

…ry clearly. George III himself called the colonists’ rebellion a “Presbyterian War.” Edmund Burke told Parliament in 1775 that the people to worry about were the New England Protestants “of that kind which is most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion” with a religion amounting to “a refinement of the principle of resistance.” What’s most remarkable about the American Revolution is how a rebellion that had passionate religion at i…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…ny of them negative. While there was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of…

The Catholic-Evangelical (Non-)Coalition

By Patricia Miller

…on as a whole. In terms of trends, 40% of Catholics supported same-sex marriage in 2001 with that number increasing to nearly 60% by 2014. By contrast, only 13% of Evangelicals favored same-sex marriage in 2001 and just 23% approve of it today. Writing in The Atlantic, PRRI’s Robert Jones gets at the truth behind these numbers: “there is more support for official Roman Catholic Church positions among white evangelical Protestants than among Cathol…

The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required

By Kelly J. Murphy

…hope for the oppressed, as it was in apartheid Africa; a critique of imperialism and commercialism; a call to remember the impact that class and gender can and does have on power dynamics. The book is more than a Doomsday Clock. Likewise, “that zombie crap you teach,” as one relative not-so-gently expressed his opinion of my course, matters. It matters because examining the monsters we fantasize about (zombies or otherwise), as scholars like Timo…

Post-Election, “Is The Black Church Dead?” Redux

By Anthea Butler

…to be tested by the Tea Party’s mobilization, voter apathy, and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first African-American Republican to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction. (He beat out Strom Thurmond’s son in the primaries.) Iraq war vete…

Conservative Republican Muslim Condemns Fox Report on Congressional Staffers as “Anti-Muslim Bigotry”

By Sarah Posner

…rt from the government; rather the status permits it to use space and provides a structure for leadership. Other groups include Christian and Jewish organizations that host prayer and study sessions. The CMSA, Khan said, engages in two main activities: hosting briefings on a variety of issues; and hosting a Congressional iftar each year that is widely attended, including by elected officials. Friday prayers are held by individual staffers, some of…

‘Imagine Better’: Can Harry Potter Change the World?

By B. Howell Belser

…Why the revolution will not be tweeted,” comparing the effectiveness of social media activism with the protests and activism of the civil rights movement. The conclusion Gladwell draws from his analysis, as is evident in the title, is to dismiss the effectiveness of new social media by arguing that it operates off of weak ties, rather than the strong ties needed to engage in dangerous, high-risk activism. In addition, he argues that the success of…

Leper Messiah: A Jesus Freak’s Search for the Meaning of Bowie—A Critical Novella

By Mark Dery

…and the title, incidentally, of a 1980 Bowie song). By outfitting his Martian messiah in campy, retro-futurist gear borrowed from the prop room of 1950s’ rocket-operas (“Keep your ‘lectric eye on me babe / Put your ray gun to my head,” Ziggy sings, in “Moonage Daydream”), Bowie provides enough ironic distance for us to see that all heavenly saviors are, by definition, space oddities: otherworldly beings who walk among us, passing as human; incorp…

Is Twitter Doing Enough to Remove Extremist Content? An Ex-Employee Weighs In

By Sofi Hersher

…n light of near universal calls for Twitter, Facebook, Ask.fm and other social media sites to suppress extremist content from public view, a number of questions arise. Some are practical: how many Twitter employees speak or read Arabic or Urdu or Farsi, etc.? Should these requests be given preferential treatment over other offensive content like child pornography or threats of rape? Who makes that decision? How many people can a company be expecte…

“Can You Tell Me Who The Villains Are?”: Rock and Religion, Irish-Style

By Lisa Bitel

…ening for a fallen innocent seems all too prescient, given the recent negotiations over revelations of priestly sexual abuse of both girls and boys. In all, the Saw Doctors have produced seven studio albums and thirty number one singles. Music critics have compared the band’s effect to that of the Grateful Dead and Bruce Springsteen because of their ability to make the small negotiations and crises of everyday life seem so politically urgent, and…