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Along comes Jersey Shore with its cast of self-described Italians. These are not the magical white folks of world-conquering, democracy-building myth-but they’re still “white”. They behave like the Museum assumes only people of my color behaved. The sum total of their television life is a kind of late-capitalist tragic anthropology: doing laundry to go to parties, in order to have sex. For me, it’s been tremendously liberating to know that people of my color and faith are not the only people who are embarrassing to watch on television.

I, like many others, have found myself unable to turn away from the Arab revolutions. As a strong believer in the egalitarian nature of the Muslim religion, and a fervent critic of common assumptions that are held about Arabs and Muslims, these revelations were a welcome confirmation of my…

The number of those who believe that rape survivors should have to carry a pregnancy to term is rising, though scrutiny of the position reveals it to be cruel and extremist.

Is the faith-talking, centrist, “new breed” of Democrat like Heath Shuler on its way out?

The majority of abortion clinics in Kansas, given less than 2 weeks to comply with new toilet and closet size regulations, would have shut their doors but for a federal judge’s 11th-hour temporary decision to block the regulations. Was it really safety or a backdoor attempt to end abortion in the state?

I was both saddened and gratified by Mark Oppenheimer’s follow-up piece on the authors of Open Embrace, a Protestant couple’s jointly-written book on why they chose not to use artificial contraception, and how it helped their marriage. Turns out, though, it didn’t work out so well for them. And I was sad to hear it. Truly.

Sharon Slater, American anti-gay activist and president of Family Watch International, recently encouraged delegates attending a law conference in Lagos, Nigeria to resist the United Nations’ calls to decriminalize homosexuality. Keynoting the Nigerian Bar Association Conference, Slater told delegates that they would lose their religious and parental rights if they supported “fictitious sexual rights.” One such “fictitious right” is the right to engage in same-sex sexual relationships without going to jail.

Coline Jenkins, great-great granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, spoke just weeks ago at the anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Sentiments, recalling her time as a teen visiting her grandmother who had “all the original major works of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her attic— The Declaration of Sentiments, The Woman’s Bible.” It was only years later, she said, that it dawned on her that she had been but “two floors away from all that history.” She further reflected on how, as a girl staying at a campground near Seneca Falls, she had gone to a laundromat that, as it turned out, was formerly the site of the Wesleyan Chapel—the site of the “largest bestowal of democratic freedoms in the U.S.” Could one imagine, she asked, “a laundromat in Independence Hall?”

What might it mean for a synagogue, a church, a mosque, or a temple, to set up a video screen in its sanctuary and play these images of death from September 11—and then turn around and respond to them? What reinvented rituals might result from a ritualized, contextualized reception of these images? Such communal framing gets us beyond the questions of morbid voyeurism because it eliminates the one-way dimension and places images within a social setting. It further allows us to reflect and come to terms with dying, thereby stirring the potential for a good death.

The documentary serves as a good illustration of the gradual and subtle influence of R. J. Rushdoony’s work in the broader culture—often in places where his name is completely unknown.