This is a word you're not supposed to say on live TV or in front of the children, but it's spiking in use these days for the same reason that any word does: because of its precision and necessity. We are seeing something in our politics, exemplified in the juvenile free-for-all of this week's Republican presidential primary debate, and we need to identify it. This appropriately crude word lets us do that. Read more
"Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land! The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing: Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant." Read more
Trump gets two endorsements that won't help him and two opponents who won't hurt him. Plus: Several stories involving American men aiming guns at American women; the NABA defense of torture; and a plea to cast Adam Driver in a Joey Ramone biopic. Read more
This enthusiasm for apocalypse is theologically malodorous, but it is also politically dangerous. Here again are L&J and their 50 million readers cheering for entropy, celebrating calamity, wars and rumors of war as the confirmation of their desires, and railing against peace and progress as setbacks to this consummation for which they devoutly wish. They believe that things must fall apart and the center must not hold, because even now the beast is slouching toward Jerusalem. They want this to happen. Read more
The truly creepy bit here doesn't have anything to do with whatever secret rituals or whatnot these men engage in during the LARPing portions of their gatherings. The creepy part is what we know because they tell us: Some of the most powerful, wealthiest, whitest, Gentile males in the world regularly gather at luxury hunting lodges for a little bit of hunting and a whole lot of networking. Read more
White evangelicals are looking to Donald Trump as a kind of modern-day Cyrus the Great. Cyrus was the ungodly king who restored the people of Israel and gave them back their country after the exile. Trump, these Christians believe, is the ungodly king who will end their long exile of life under a black president, giving white folks back "their" land. Read more
Sarah Posner on why apocalyptic American Christians are not "friends of Israel." Heather Havrilesky on true romance. Julie Rodgers on Wheaton. Edmund N. Santurri's crash-course on Reinhold Niebuhr. And Broderick Greer guides us into Lent. Read more
What we're seeing here is a failure of, as Gushee says, "moral formation." When one student fails the final exam, the fault may lie with that student. When the entire class fails the final exam, the fault lies with the professor. And when we see a massive failure of moral formation on the scale of what we're seeing with white evangelical support for Trump, the fault lies with the entire faculty, the entire curriculum, and the culture of the entire school. Read more
Bruce Barnes died at the end of the previous book. Now, some 300 pages and several weeks of story-time later, his body is wheeled out for his memorial service. Where has Bruce Barnes been all this time? That's really two questions, one logistical, the other theological. And the authors don't seem to have given much thought to either one. Read more
A return to the gold standard would be disastrous, but it clearly would also produce a massive "end-time transfer of wealth." And the weirdest thing is that I'm not accusing Ted Cruz of planning that, I'm just pointing out that he's telling us that's what he has planned. Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In