Christian Porn: Tackling the Elephant in the Pews
by Clint Rainey
Some pastors view Super Bowl Sunday and church attendance as inverses—if the first, less of the second. (The joke is pastors conclude their sermons the week before that second holiest of Sundays with “See you in two weeks.”) But this year, replete with bizarre props, attracting media attention like
Inspired, Yes, but Divinely?
A review of Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life
by Clint Rainey
A few scientists and believers once naïvely clasped hands in hope that the evolutionary explanation for belief in God would signal a détente in the science-religion war. Belief could satisfy science by being instinctual, as Dean...
Commie Harry
“What really makes these critics hate Million Dollar Baby is not its supposedly radical politics — which are nonexistent — but its lack of sentimentality. It is, indeed, no Rocky, and in our America that departure from the norm is itself a form of cultural radicalism.” Frank Rich has Clint Eastwood’s back in the Christian conservative culture skirmish over Million Dollar...
Our Daily Links: Doin’ The Math Edition
God spends $390 million lobbying Washington every year.
Jonathan Jones writes at The Guardian about the now-iconic photo of 84 year old Occupy activist Dorli Rainey after being pepper sprayed in Seattle:
America is a religious nation and I can't help thinking that either the people in the picture, or the photographer, consciously or unconsciously...
Threat Logic
Brazilian nun killers can count on American Catholics to stay focused on what reallymatters — gay marriage and Clint Eastwood movies. Hired gunmen shot an American nun, 74-year-old Dorothy Stang of Ohio, in the face three times on Saturday. Stang, a member of the Catholic Congregation of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, had been helping Brazilian...
American Aquarium Drinker
Drunk on pop-culture holiness, it’s easy to forget the nation’s first noble truth: America is not a religious metaphor. By Peter Manseau Six years ago I lived in the chi-chi wilds of Western Massachusetts, in a town whose population increased fivefold every June and in which the biggest houses around were left vacant nine months...
