A Religious Litmus Test Won’t Stop the Organized Power of the Right
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Supreme Court Justice and liberal feminist hero, has paved the way for Donald Trump to nominate the third Justice of his tenure as President. Though a few Republicans initially held out on pledging to allow the nomination a floor vote or to approve the nominee, as of last week […]
The Police, Militia Collaborators and White Supremacy
The police were driving George Taylor to jail. The husband, father, and local farmer had been accused of assaulting a woman named Ruby Rogers on her rural Rolesville, NC farm. On the way, the police car that carried Taylor was intercepted by four men in blue masks. The sheriff’s office turned Taylor over to the […]
What to Do About Harry Potter? J.K. Rowling, Transphobia and Idolatry
My small act of rebellion in a household where my mother had become gripped by fundamentalist evangelism was reading Harry Potter. It seemed self-evident to me—and still is—that no demon was going to burst out of the pages and possess me. Mother sent me to camp in middle school, and as part of a divorce power struggle, dad gave me pocket money.
Unmasking Mammon: A Review of A People’s Guide to Capitalism
Modern economics is supposedly the pinnacle of the social sciences, a discipline of grandiose scope able to exhaustively explain the complex workings of capitalism and direct its development toward ever-greater degrees of rationality and efficiency. Economists appear as the great stewards of an activity as old as humanity itself—exchange between two equal parties. Through a preoccupation […]
The Church Must Be Antifascist
Trump is not Hitler and America is not a fascist theocracy. But America has long nurtured its own fascistic ideas and movements and Trump is ripening conditions for its growth. The Christian Church now has a choice to make: be antifascist or acquiesce to fascism.
QAnon is the Perfect Evangelical Conspiracy
QAnon is just the latest twist in a well-established tradition of evangelical language and motifs, as well as its anxieties and fears. It’s not “the alternative religion that’s coming to your church,” because it’s already there, and always has been, albeit in slightly different forms.
The Nadir of Saint Louis: Against Christian Cultural Heritage
On June 27th, protestors and counter-protestors outside the Saint Louis Art Museum faced off around a statue titled The Apotheosis of Saint Louis, depicting King Louis IX of France raising the cross astride a decorated horse. One side chanted “Black Lives Matter” and called for the statue’s removal, while the other said Hail Marys and defended the […]
What Does the White Evangelical Want?
Cruelty operates not at the level of information but at the level of desire.
The Violence of Forgetting
They came for him. They criminalized him. They subdued him. They suffocated him. His lungs were giving out. His arms began to weaken. His eyes began to close. His voice was giving out. The community heard him cry. The community watched him die. No one did anything. (No one could.) He died. He died slowly. […]
Toward a Radical New Deal
2020 will go down as one of the most potted years in recent history. In the span of just a few months, which have seemed like decades each, we have experienced a global health pandemic, massive waves of unemployment in the US nearing the levels of the Great Depression, sustained public protests over racial injustice and police […]