popular culture

While it is tempting to dismiss professional athletes as overpaid ingrates, how many of us have to endure what amounts to 70 car accidents each Sunday? If Michael Vick were a janitor, he’d be back at work by now.

For viewers whose search for meaning is not confined to institutional religion, the television landscape abounds with religious and moral themes. And whether it’s euthanasia, polygamy, angels, demons, or clerics doing cameos, treatment of religion on the small screen is often surprisingly sophisticated.

Last week’s corruption bust is not the tale of a uniquely Jewish form of organized crime, a “Kosher Nostra,” but a sordid chapter in a broadly human tragedy—albeit with a lot of local color.

In a recent promotional letter, Richard Dawkins caricatured the average American’s Christian beliefs. Problem is, caricatures cease to be useful when the critic invites his audience to deride the real thing based on a lampoon.

What went through the mind of this haunted man with the “thousand-yard stare” in his later years as he shuffled back and forth to work just “a hand grenade’s throw” from the Vietnam War Memorial?

Set against the backdrop of the recent closure of a Knesset cafeteria due to an unkosher cockroach, Shalom Goldman takes an entertaining and meandering look at the state of affairs in Israel. Touching on topics as disparate as the alliteration-happy Israeli media and racist policy proposals, Goldman brings into sharp relief some of the tensions in Israeli religious and cultural life, much of which remains at the mercy of the Orthodox rabbinate.

It’s great that the former president is speaking out against unequal treatment of women but why did it take him 60 years to leave the SBC?

House Made of Dawn inaugurated the so-called “Native American Renaissance”…

Rachel Ray is wearing a black and white scarf in a recent ad campaign for Dunkin Donuts and Michelle Malkin screams “kufiyah!” Apparently, black and white scarves mean that you support violent jihad.

The best-selling scholar says that the Bible is more violent than the Qur’an, that religious fundamentalism is political, and more.