oklahoma city bombing

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.

Shooter Wade Michael Page thought he was a soldier in a cosmic war.

A power struggle between personhood lobby and the Republican leadership?

If Anders Behring Breivik isn’t a Christian terrorist, then the same can be said of Osama bin Laden and many other Islamist activists—whose writings show that they were much more interested in Islamic history than theology or scripture and imagined themselves as re-creating glorious moments in Islamic history in their own imagined wars.

An overview.

Confessed shooter wrote that “politically correct elites” made Europe soft to Islam.

Bachmann speaks from the altar, Palin from behind a camera.

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.

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