Search

As NAACP President Ben Jealous told the Times last week, “it’s become clear that, just as Bayard Rustin admonished us all, that we would either stand together or die apart.” “ Who admonished us?” readers must have asked. Bayard Rustin’s role as advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and as organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech) should have assured his place in American social and political history. But Rustin has long been denied his proper place—largely because he was an openly gay man.

Haidt’s primary point is actually a good one: people on all sides of the political debate ought to listen more carefully, and try harder to understand one another. He correctly identifies a cardinal sin of so many liberals and lefties: failing to give conservatives an honest hearing. But it’s lousy strategy. If you want to win, you’ve got to have the best possible intelligence about what the other side is up to.

Obama’s SOTU was a deft combination of centuries-old American exceptionalism and a decades-old consensus that can best be called “semi-Niebuhrianism.”

According to the Census Bureau, white babies account for less than half of U.S. births. How will white Christians, who have long believed this to be a white Christian nation, respond?

Not since The Israel Lobby has a Jewish book evoked so much ire and criticism from the American Jewish community.

In The Mirage, 9/11 is actually 11/9, the day when Christian fundamentalists from Texas slammed airliners into Baghdad skyscrapers, sparking a war on terror that rages across a nearly unrecognizable North America. Will Americans go for a book where the world power is the United Arab States and the lead characters are almost all Arabs and Muslims?

Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror flick—among others in the ’60s and ’70s—may provide some surprising insights into the GOP’s “War on Women.”

This spring, workers at Planned Parenthood began to notice a flurry of visits from women asking very pointedly if they could use the women’s health organization’s services to abort a child based on gender. What’s the aim of these hoax visits? Support for PRENDA, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, a bill currently making its way through Congress.

It’s usually clear to Bart Ehrman who loves him and who hates him. Evangelical Christians have been raking Ehrman over the coals for years for his rejection of biblical inerrancy—and atheists and humanists have embraced his writing as ammunition in the fight against the evils of organized religion. In his new book, Did Jesus Exist?, Ehrman debunks the work of so-called “mythicists”—writers who have argued that a man named Jesus who taught about the coming Kingdom of God never really existed, and that the religions created around him are nothing but fantasy.

Given the spotty history of L. Ron Hubbard’s life and the church’s well-documented vindictiveness toward critics, there’s a great deal of criticism to be found on Scientology. But two new books examine the history of the church without sensationalism or facile mockery.