capitalism

Truth-Telling in Vulgaria
Questions for Kathryn Joyce, who bursts the international Christian adoption bubble in her new book, The Child Catchers.

The End of Macha
With the end of the world approaching, I will be snuggling up somewhere beneath a mosquito net, floating down a river through the mostly still-wild and mysterious Bolivian Amazon. I look forward to staring up at the stars, trying to piece together exactly what the Mayans had in mind (or didn’t—they may have just gotten…

True Religion Falls on Weak Earnings, Downgrade
At first glance, I thought this headline referred to the One True Faith Guess that serves them right for trying to boonswoggle people about the nature of $300 cotton pants @

God and Wal-Mart
This week I spoke with GRITtv’s Laura Flanders about the surprisingly diverse Christian Right opposition to the Obama administration. Is racism a major component of the tea party movement? No doubt. But is the broader right a lot more complicated? Absolutely. I witnessed that complexity a few weeks ago in the prayer rooms of the…

Bring Out Your Dead
“The Man giveth, and The Man taketh away.” So begins JoAnn Wypijewski’s sermonic report on a report, the AFL-CIO’s 18th annual “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect.” Wypijewski only rarely writes explicitly about religion, but a religious aesthetic of witness animates her prose, some of the best literary journalism published today. “Death at…

It’s the Theology, Stupid
Understanding the Republican disconnect, explained by one of the people who helped create it.

How to Give Alms
Let’s start with some exegesis. Matthew 6:2-4. Go. So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not…

Galt Almighty
Bad news: Ayn Rand’s Alas Shrugged— sales of which are booming — is going to become a movie, starring Angelina Jolie, who will channel her father’s conservative politics and dip as deeply as she can into the shallows of her own politics of narcissism to portray the doorstopper’s protagonist Dagny Taggert, witness to the ubermensch…

Heady Days
There’s nothing particularly religious about the recent record-breaking sale of a jewel-encrusted platinum skull by Order Cheap Cialis the British artist Damien Hirst. Yes, its $100 million price tag may be religious in the “Holy Shit!” sense, but beyond that it just seems silly that so much could be made of a glorified paperweight: Certainly…