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American evangelicals have helped cultivate the homophobic atmosphere in Uganda that has begun to translate into violence.

After her agonizing break, a former devout Mormon explains why she felt the need to write about her church.

Today, we often are told that the hysterical ravings of the New Christian Right (NCR) are a pathological homophobia, or perhaps a displaced and sublimated yearning for homoeroticism. Doubtless both play a role, but I want to suggest that homosexuality does threaten civilization, when viewed from a certain perspective, and that it has been seen this way since biblical times.

Countering the right’s narratives is not an “uphill battle.”

The positive reception of Budrus in the U.S. says a lot about the political climate today. The right-wing “pro-Israel” movement is going through a tough time. It has always built its public appeal on one simple narrative: Israel wants peace, but it must fight to ward off implacable violence from its enemies. Anything Israel does is justified because it’s in self-defense.

There’s a scene in Martin Preib’s recent and remarkable collection of essays where he describes pulling over to the side of the road to scribble down a note, deep in conversation about the work of Walt Whitman, about what that work accomplished and how. “My terms are useless:…

The ancients were wise to life’s tragedies too. Some things do, apparently, go badly. (They could hardly think otherwise, living during that long period of history in which death was associated with the young, not the old.) So, their instruction was to ‘go with the flow’ even when that is hard to stomach. Theirs is not a relentless optimism, expecting everything, like Byrne’s. Rather, the Stoics advocated expecting nothing, but working at everything.

President Obama was in Indonesia this week, but was forced to cut his trip short. As of this writing, Indonesia’s Mount Merapi is still spewing clouds of ash into the sky, and the death toll from the eruptions that began two weeks ago has grown to 191. Mbah Marijan was among the victims of he recent eruptions. He was eighty-three years old, and the juri cunci of the volcano, a “guardian of the key,” responsible for maintaining a relationship to the spirits of the mountain.

“Cease and desist” was Sarah Palin’s rebel yell at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke last week, in a speech attacking the Fed’s plan to buy up $600 billion in government debt to stimulate the US economy.

A week before an election that saw Oklahoma pass Measure 755, forbidding the use of international and Shari’ah law in state courts, Literary theorist and New York Times contributor Stanley Fish penned a piece for the Times.