Anti-Government

Secular holidays, actually constituting a quasi-sacred calendar, span the entire year: From New Year’s Day, the King Holiday, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veteran’s Day, and now, at long last, Thanksgiving Day.

Harvard’s humanist chaplain disagrees… sort of.

Why are people attracted to living charismatic leaders?

As soon as it became clear that the older of the two suspects in the Boston bombing had become a more fervent Muslim in recent years, commentators began to point to religion as the culprit. But is it?

No one has yet stepped out of the shadows to claim credit for the horrific bomb attacks on the Boston marathon Monday that killed three and seriously injured over a hundred. But rumors abound.

Logic is the key to the story. In this case, once we know how many thousands of Americans are killed by guns each year and know that places with the fewest guns have the fewest murders, it’s only logical to regulate gun ownership and possession. But even the most convincing logic can rarely defeat a rich, emotionally powerfully, historically deep-rooted myth. And the gun control advocates’ progressive myth is depressingly thin and emotionally weak compared to the thick, potent store of myth wielded by their opponents.

A scholar returning from a visit with Syrian opposition figures discusses the role of religion in the Syrian civil war, including whether it’s a sectarian war, what Americans need to know, and whether a post-war Syria will be an Islamic state.

We remember child martyrs in the crusades, young Holocaust victims like Anne Frank, the deaths of Emmett Till and four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama. The children of the day care center in Oklahoma City. Our enduring image from that dark day is a fireman, soaked in blood, carrying a baby on the cover of the magazines. Youth move us because they bring to the light the existential horror of no future.

Listen up, conservative pundits. You can’t say that because God isn’t in a classroom, that we have reaped what we’ve sown—and then ask for guns in schools at the same time.

The recent spate of mass killers all sought to solve their problems with a certain expression of gun violence that maps easily onto the masculinist roots of Christianity and other religious traditions—particularly in more conservative expressions.