popular culture

After Barack Obama pointed out in a televised address on the San Bernardino shootings that Muslim Americans occupy many familiar social roles including “sports heroes,” Donald Trump offered an…

On Wednesday, December 2, 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29, murdered 14 people and injured 21 during a targeted attack at Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, CA. In the…

Zombies are the perfect villains for our multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural, interconnected age.

Or, why we’re glad American culture settled on “Thanksgiving” over “Fasting and Humiliation.”

In a quiet part of the London borough of Southwark, on a street running parallel to the Thames, there is an old, dark-wood paneled pub with leaded windows. Formerly known by the borderline obscene…

Today, Pope Francis arrives in Nairobi, Kenya. After two days in Kenya, he will travel to Uganda, and then to the Central African Republic. The Pope’s message of care for those on the margins and his…

In honor of the shameful refusal to accept Syrian refugees, a rewrite of the “Statue of Liberty” poem.

As a former (veteran, even) employee of Twitter, I am used to people expressing shock and confusion at the need for “just a website” to employ so many people, or a genuine wonder if we all sit around…

Anyone who saw last year’s standout documentary, Jesse Moss’ The Overnighters, probably noted a brief, sober coda to the story: one of the film’s subjects, Keith Graves, was recently convicted of sex…

For twenty years I have sprinkled discussions of the black social gospel into various books while imploring scholars that we need a book on this tradition. Finally I applied the imploring to myself…