Anti-Government

Structured around a family (mother, father, three children) which suffers a terrible loss, The Tree of Life is an extended midrash, or commentary, on the Book of Job, a verse of which forms the epigraph to the film and which is sermonized upon during an extended scene at a church. At once essentially Catholic and doggedly scientific in its worldview, its central family becomes an archetype, undergoing processes of childlike wonderment, Oedipal lust and rage, the loss of innocence, the loss of faith, and finally, it seems, redemption.

People kept asking, “Why would you go to a Christian school if you’re gay?” The question is unfair. So many factors—funding, family, a deep connection to the religious culture—could place a student at Harding. While more and more students may show up their first year of college with self-awareness about sexual identity, as they do at the public university where I teach, I know it is difficult to come to terms with yourself if you grow up in fundamentalist Christian culture. Many of us come out while in college; at Harding finding ourselves in a world in which something fundamental about ourselves is a category of silence at best, more likely a category of condemnation and stigmatization.

Skousen, popularized by Beck, was the Cold War era’s David Barton.

At the root of our desire for retribution is the wish that those who have wronged us feel the full weight of what they have done, suffering remorse proportionate in severity to the gravity of their crime. In short, we hunger for their redemption. And so, when the retributive impulse is finally satisfied, it naturally resolves itself into forgiveness. The darkness is lifted, because the evil—the dissociation from the good that inspired the crime—has been destroyed.

Three Muslim Americans of Jewish and Irish heritage on Peter King.

The support of many Republican presidential candidates demonstrates the success of a cottage industry based on the conspiracy theory that totalitarian Islamic radicals are bent on infiltrating America, displacing the Constitution, and subverting Western-style democracy in the U.S. and around the globe.

David Noebel makes Tea Party movement warnings of the anti-Americanism of liberals and Democrats feel like an unbroken conspiratorial thread from the Cold War to the Obama presidency.

Mike Lee abandons his father’s legacy in favor of Skousen, and tosses reason and pragmatism out the window.

According to one author there is something unique about American antipathy to Islam that differs substantially from earlier campaigns against Catholics, Jews and other religious minorities.

RD’s weekly review doesn’t flinch when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar shows up in a Stetson.