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Listening in on the Right-Wing Fringe: Gay Marriage Edition

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ng internal debates about big issues like marriage equality. Over at World Net Daily (which features such fact-challenged articles on how terrorists are setting wildfires and ads that promise to show you how to get an untraceable AR-15) there’s a fairly comprehensive article laying out the argument between those who wish to privatize marriage, and those who believe the government’s role is a necessary evil … for the children. Those speaking in fav…

Vatican’s New Media Evangelizing Strategy Can’t Save it from All The Bad News

By Anthea Butler

…ion also had its dissenters, notably, representatives from SNAP (Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests) were there, as well as a group of women campaigning to be ordained as priests. It perhaps is no coincidence then, that while the Pope was concelebrating mass for the Year of the Priest that had turned into the Year the Pedophile Priests, Part II, the Pew Forum was releasing a little journalistic beatification of its own, a report on medi…

Turn Off, Slow Down, Drop In: The Digital Generation Reinvents the Sabbath

By Elizabeth Drescher

…pressions of compassion, it was clear that this connectedness mattered—the network was a kind of safety net. And, for my part, I was grateful, even in my very loose personal connection to them, to be aware of what was going on and to be able to hold them and their babies in my heart that day. Banishing Technology Adam and Sarah have been on my mind a great deal this week as I reflect on a very different social media experience: next weekend’s Nat…

Eat, Pray, Kill: The Basic Brutality of Eating

By Beatrice Marovich

…dies’ legs into provocative stockings” or the “lusty buttocks” of ham. The net effect, she suggests, is the emanation of a “you know you want it” kind of sensuality. Make no mistake. Meat—the flesh of non-human animals—is a force of desire in human life. But is there an ethical argument in favor of flesh consumption? That is, can a meat-eating human find solid moral ground for her more carnivorous appetites? Is there a soul-cure for the stomachach…

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

By Peter Laarman

…et 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 reserved exclusively for whites. W…

Honey, I Shrunk the Church: The Vatican Manages Sexual Abuse, Canonization and the Nuns

By Mary E. Hunt

…for the corporate entity, the thousands of dioceses they oversee on the planet. Those folks are suddenly on their own when it comes to liability. Rome’s hands are off. The Holy See is the “juridical personification of the Church,” considered the government of the Catholic Church. It is located in Vatican City (which really is not, by most lights, a state). Will the real Roman Catholic Church please stand up? This is all quite murky, resulting in t…

Attacks on Tim Walz’s Lutheran Denomination are Undermined by Reality — I Mean, Is ELCA Even Exciting Enough for Controversy?

By Daniel Schultz

…favor among mainline Protestants overall, and only somewhat lower than the net 56% approval rating mainliners gave Trump in June of 2020. One might want to be fair to the ELCA’s detractors by noting that White evangelical Protestants turned out in far higher numbers for the former president. So perhaps the matter of ELCA support for Trump is simply a matter of perspective. On the other hand, the ELCA vote for Trump was substantially higher than th…

How the Conspiratorial American Right is Spinning the Egypt Protests

By Sarah Posner

…that is connected to Islam and that is proud to be Muslim? Now enter World Net Daily — the chief outlet for birtherite conspiracy theories which has relentlessly pushed the absurdity that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen and is a Muslim — and its ever-unreliable Middle East correspondent Aaron Klein, the “reporter” behind the debunked claim that Hamas supported Obama. He takes aim at Nobel Laureate and pro-democracy dissident Mohamed ElBarade…

Herd Heroism in an Age of Rebels: The Cultural Roots of the Anti-Vaxxer Movement

By Michael Schulson

…, as Americans, we have little notion of what life without a social safety net actually looks like—at least until we head into the developing world. Similarly, fringe religious movements thrive, in part, because they stay on the fringe. It’s easier to live out your utopia when you don’t also have to maintain the infrastructure of a nation state, too. If we were all members of the Followers of Christ Church, for example, the country probably wouldn…

Tim LaHaye’s World: We’re Living In It

By Jason C. Bivins

…mptied coffers after Vietnam, the disastrous slashing of the social safety net in the 1980s, the protracted legitimation crisis in American democracy, and the failure attend to the still crippling forces of racism, inequality, and political apathy are the big stories in this America, LaHaye’s fact-fictional writing constituted a kind of archive deflecting attention from these issues, instead giving his readers and sympathizers an escape route. It…