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National Coming Out day elicits both despondency and outrage in the wake of the recent suicides of Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, and Billy Lucas. Yet, the various laments against bullying in the media overlook the question about the “tougher, more uncertain work (of) creating a world that loves queer kids, that wants them to live and thrive.” Few of the commentaries about Clementi, Brown, Walsh, Lucas and others address the broader context of responsibility for their suicides.

And other twists on end-times talk.

More in the political advertising wars.

It didn’t help that Galileo would satirize and mock the Church hierarchy.

Some professional historians and scholars of American religion have criticized PBS’ God doc. This is not a surprise. After all, when has the academic community ever been comfortable watching its territory invaded by an army of people lacking PhDs? On blogs, religion and history listserves, and chat rooms around the country, academics have labeled the series “oversimplified,” “truly bizarre,” “simplistic,” “intolerable,” “uneventful,” “underwhelming.” Essentially they are calling the series not enough of an “intellectual endeavor.”

Last week’s six-hour PBS documentary, God in America, wasn’t really about God in America. Nor was it about religions in America. Following a fairly conventional narrative in mainstream discourse (albeit not one adopted by the contemporary Christian right), the series…

But there are some surprising things that will.

“Whoever has done an atom’s weight of good, shall see it; and whoever has done an atom’s weight of sin, shall see it.”

Florida’s bitterly contested Governor race just got more controversial.

The political types, both right and left, have managed to create the idea that the sixties were a time of leftist, collectivist politics. But this was actually an era of mad individualism, not collectivism, of romantic essentialism, not social construction. The old lefties failed in their every effort to organize… and a lot of old hippies are Ron Paul types today.