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Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…hought 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 ordering experie…

Are American Christians “Persecuted”?

By Eric C. Miller

…SIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed. At Patheos, Benjamin Corey shakes that cheap argument awake: Can we stop complaining about this bogus idea that American Christians are persecuted now? I mean, really. Can we stop? The world needs us to turn from ourselves and focus on this real persecution, because it’s evil and must be exposed and stopped. However, our own self-centeredness as Americans is getting in the way of the dis…

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…

Updated: My Work on Confederate Monuments Leaves This Christian Ethicist Distrustful of Calls for Reconciliation and Healing

By Ryan Andrew Newson

…e with Mitch McConnell during his time in office—in order to “get things done.” If one is relatively comfortable with the status quo, then such calls for reconciliation, unity, or “bipartisanship” will sound like common sense. Simply tone down the rhetoric, resist “extremism,” and stress “pragmatic” solutions, and everything will work out. President Obama’s recent memoir is a good example of the rhetorical power of such appeals to “unity,” at leas…

The Economy is Racism: Ending Race-Based Economic Violence is the Real Challenge of This Moment

By Peter Laarman

…lessness of the U.S. labor market is of course matched by the cruelty of a near-nonexistent social safety net that remains a source of horrified wonderment to observers from other developed countries. Yet again, the reason is racism. As New York Times economic journalist Eduardo Porter points out in American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise, the social supports created in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II were res…

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

By Nicole Greenfield

…familiar with the same rhetorical language that’s been used for decades. One need look no further than 93-year-old Billy Graham’s endorsement of Amendment 1 to realize that the terms of this debate are firmly rooted deeply in the past. “For me, it’s heartbreaking that we’re still having this conversation,” Bakker said, noting conservative Christianity’s continued insistence on law and regulation and divisiveness. “I wish people lived life on life…

“Reconciliation” With Indigenous People is Comforting For Many Canadians, But is a Christian Concept Up To The Task?

By Pamela Klassen and Joseph Wiebe

…obe and Mail essay, however, the land that settlers imagined as free wilderness was neither free nor empty. And, they write, the deadly effects of the myths of settler masculinity persist today, as the trial of Colten Boushie’s killer showed. Even if Mennonites thought they had found a pacifist’s paradise in the prairies, their deeds to the land came at the price of violence to Indigenous peoples who still understood the land as their own. Mennoni…

How Not to Support Obamacare

By Peter Laarman

…his episode should be a wake-up call to all those who have spent tons of money trying to inject some faithiness into Democratic politics—these efforts are obviously not working. Yes, Dems do call out the House troglodytes on the grounds of their “callousness” or “cynicism” or what have you. But as we see from the comments above, there’s no real ethical substratum in any of the celebrity Dems, let alone among Dems who are deserting Obama completely…

Celebrate Jesus with Weird Merchandise!

By Gwynne Watkins

…ets, 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 contains a small section dedicated to Jesus merchandise, which results in some odd juxtapositions. Here, for example, are the current most popular category them…

Who’s to Blame for BP?

By David True

…flowing in multiple directions for everything from apathy to self-righteousness. Near the center of that motley crew are 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 ocea…