popular culture

We picketed bishops and Popes, stole their dresses, stood up at the consecration of the Eucharist and said the words out loud. We are the bad girls of Catholic feminism, and we have stood up, over and over again, for women’s freedom.

Most people know only the Big-C Christianity—Christ, Constantine, Christendom, Calvin, and Christian America—but there is another one, linked to a biblical parable of a wounded man’s rescue by a stranger.

Controversial mega-pastor Rick Warren gave a little-noticed sermon at King’s home church in Atlanta on Monday. In it he seemed to dance around the controversy, invoking King’s unpopularity seemingly in reference to his.

After spending a year exploring life in digital Islamic communities, a new project finds that people are building new narratives to find ways to coexist; their report even includes a policy recommendation for the Obama administration’s diplomacy efforts in the Middle East.

The best-selling poet in America today was born in Afghanistan, practiced a form of Islam that originated in Iraq, and has been dead for 800 years. How did a white man from Tennessee, who doesn’t read a lick of Persian, make Rumi accessible to mainstream America?

Perry Moore, ardent Christian and author of Hero, believes that the time has come for the younger generation to supplant the older generation of bigots.

Plus: Bill Maher’s “Christian Bashing”; African-American support for Prop. 8 exaggerated; Trouble in Narnialand and Worst anti-Gay voices

When Bruce Pardo, dressed as Santa Claus, murdered friends and family on Christmas eve he was acting out a tragic bit of ceremonial violence, and borrowing an ironic and horrifying role from film and comics.

While the history of popularization is a history of regular folk learning about other regular revolutionizing folk and imitating them, comic book histories like The Wordy Shipmates do their part in ensuring that the next generation knows more about Beyoncé than Byzantium.

Evil has been a favorite foreign policy tool for conservatives in and around the Bush Administration; problem is, there are often unintended consequences.