RDBook: The Lost Scopes Archive
A new book on the Scopes “Monkey Trial” reveals history through people, images, and good old soap opera.
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To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
According to a pathbreaking new book, Wal-Mart’s success in reframing traditional gender roles, bending the curricula of business schools, and sanctifying working-class consumer capitalism, help explain the connections between conservative politics, the market economy, and family values.
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Gordon Gekko Gets God: The Heritage Foundation of Theology
Even after the “revelation” that letting unregulated moneymen run the country isn’t a good idea, the neoliberals at the Heritage Foundation are still churning out the message; like the latest book by “theologian” Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution And Not the Problem.
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The Bible Says… and Other Myths About Scripture
Revealing why citing “chapter and verse” once had no meaning, why 16th century Catholics capitalized “Word” but not “God,” and why the King James Bible is anti-Puritan, Lori Anne Ferrell’s new book reminds us that everything is historical: the Christian religion, the Christian people, the Christian book.
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Christian Punk Meets American Pop; Evangelicals in the ’Burbs
How did Christianity become so commercial? Is religious punk rock an oxymoron? The author of a new book on suburban evangelicalism and Christian heavy metal shows how Christian youth culture has been commodified and sold to secular audiences.
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The Bible as Security Blanket, Blindfold, or Weapon
Drawing on sources as diverse as feminist theology, biblical criticism and Midrash, renowned poet Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s latest book of essays seeks to rescue the Bible from the clutches of narrow conservatism.
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Don’t Blame Secularism: Reading Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion
A new book of essays argues that the American media suffers due to secularism and a general ignorance of religion. But is secularism really at the heart of it, or is it a far broader and longer-standing relationship with ignorance of our “enemies” that creates the Blind Spot?
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Why I Am Still a Christian
A friend once asked Diana Butler Bass why she was still a Christian. The answer lies in the question of spiritual memory, and of a community that exists through time.
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Christianity v. Christ: An Excerpt From A People’s History of Christianity
Most people know only the Big-C Christianity—Christ, Constantine, Christendom, Calvin, and Christian America—but there is another one, linked to a biblical parable of a wounded man’s rescue by a stranger.
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Found in Translation: How a Thirteenth-Century Islamic Poet Conquered America
The best-selling poet in America today was born in Afghanistan, practiced a form of Islam that originated in Iraq, and has been dead for 800 years. How did a white man from Tennessee, who doesn’t read a lick of Persian, make Rumi accessible to mainstream America?
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