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Mainstream evangelicals generally do not identify with the tone and emphasis of the religious right. When people like me criticize the religious right, these mainstream evangelicals often complain that such criticisms overemphasize the influence of a vocal, but marginal, minority that does not represent the views of most evangelicals. That’s the complaint voiced here by [...]

Joseph Stiglitz: “To Cure the Economy“ Government plays a central role in financing the services that people want, like education and health care. And government-financed education and training, in particular, will be critical in restoring competitiveness in Europe and the US. But both have chosen fiscal austerity, all but ensuring that their economies’ transitions will [...]

Tribulation Force, pp. 429-433 Rayford found it difficult to take in the incredible change in New Babylon since the first time he had visited following the treaty signing in Israel. He had to hand it to Carpathia and his sea of money. A lavish world capital had sprung up out of the ruins, and now [...]

The Atlantic’s Molly Ball reports, “Religious Right Still Lacking a Champion in 2012 Field.” Ball attended a public discussion between Sojourners’ Jim Wallis, a standard-bearer for progressive evangelicals, and Richard Land, the conservative head of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. It’s somewhat encouraging to hear Land criticizing the Republican primary field for [...]

Charlie Pierce has lost all patience with David Brooks’ shtick. That’s an amusing rant, if you like that sort of thing (I do, and Pierce is really good at it), but I’m just going to use it as an excuse to repost part of my own David Brooks rant, explaining why his book Bobos in [...]

I’m reading W. Scott Poole’s Satan in America: The Devil We Know and have just finished his discussion of Billy Sunday, the celebrity evangelist of the early 20th century. Poole sends us to George M. Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture, in which he shares a warning attributed to Sunday in 1925: Our country is filled [...]

Business Insider gives us yet another hideous chart documenting not just inequality, but the growing chasm between the 1 percenters and the rest of us. Yep, from 1979 through 2007, the 1-percenters were the only ones who saw their income grow. The rest of us have been headed the other way for more than 30 [...]

I read John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society more than 15 years ago in an edition, the fourth, that was then already 10 years old. I don’t know how the argument of that book has held up over time or whether it is still well-regarded within the discipline of economics. But yesterday I found myself [...]

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain is winning cheers on the campaign trail for telling the poor and the unemployed that they have only themselves to blame: “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks — if you don’t have a job and you are not rich, blame yourself!” G.K. Chesterton offered a different perspective: [...]

Tribulation Force, pp. 425-426 The double ceremony in Bruce’s office two weeks later was the most private wedding anyone could imagine. If you’re getting married and your dad is getting married at the same time in the same room by the same preacher, then I can actually imagine a much more private wedding ceremony. Only [...]