popular culture

I deeply regret that some people took, or claimed to take, my use of this metaphor as a reference to Sarah Palin. Let me say categorically that I do not see Governor Palin as a pig…

We may not have had a big map, or red and blue markers, or a flashing digital electoral vote count, but some of our favorite writers agreed to share a few words on this big day.

In a small town in Spain, a yearly festival celebrates the hybrid racial and cultural identities, both Christian and Muslim, of the local populace—a ritual of reconciliation.

The main difference between the enactment of the heroic archetype in myth and in popular culture is our contemporary squeamishness about the homoerotic vibe that usually hums just beneath the surface of the drama. We try to banish that gayness, or at least keep it at bay, but the pesky thing about archetypes is that they’re not very easily controlled.

Many will draw hasty conclusions from a new breakthrough on the cancer front. The real breakthroughs have been telling us that what we—our genes and cells— experience, can affect our children and our children’s children.

Is authentic religious commitment incompatible with critical thinking, reason, or compromise, as philosopher Simon Critchley seems to imply in a recent essay on Obama? Or is our challenge to refuse the false oppositions between total transformation and conflict, or politics and piety?

It has become common to blame the black community for the passage of California’s same-sex marriage ban. A look at the statistics and logic put the lie to this seductive and simplistic narrative.

A generation after the infamous Scopes Trial, a biology teacher, Susan Epperson, went to court and won the right to teach evolution theory. Even the election of a new, more science-friendly administration, however, does not ensure that the Bible will no longer be used as a science textbook.

RD News Round-Up—November 24, 2008: Religious Right’s ‘Obama Watch’; RaptureReady.com getting readier; Focus on the Family’s ‘I Stand for Christmas’ campaign; Proposition 8: The Aftermath; Huckabee’s revenge; Christian doctrine cures OCD?

Are the deaths of “our” people more important to us? What were two Brooklyn Jews doing in India anyway? Our columnist reflects on the selective sympathies of Westerners—of Jews in particular—upon hearing the news of the murder of an Orthodox rabbi and his wife during this Indian national tragedy.