American Soundings

American Soundings

Rodney Clapp explores the religious dimensions of popular culture

Soldiers against torture

Oct 04, 2010 by Rodney Clapp

Their stories are too little told—the stories of U.S. servicemen and women of devout religious faith who, often at great cost, stood up to protest the use of torture in the American open-ended war on terror.

The nicotine journal

Sep 13, 2010 by Rodney Clapp

This summer I reread Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison in Fortress Press's extra­ordinary new edition of his collected works. Letters and Papers remains almost endlessly suggestive and stimulating theologically. But in this reading I noticed how often the imprisoned Luth­eran pastor mentioned tobacco.

Hard of listening

Aug 11, 2010 by Rodney Clapp

Grandma and Bob got along famously. They complemented one another: Grand­ma was hard of hearing and Bob was almost blind.

TV's true golden age

Cable for the best drama
Jul 27, 2010 by Rodney Clapp
The 1950s and 1960s are often cited as the golden age of television. Those were the days when comedians such as Groucho Marx and writers such as Rod Serling worked in the business. That era produced many programs that still bear rewatching (The Dick Van Dyke Show, for one, and I say this not just because I had a boyhood crush on Mary Tyler Moore).

When sin goes viral

A technological analogy

Jun 29, 2010 by Rodney Clapp

Adam is . . . scattered throughout the globe. Set in one place, he fell and, as it were, broken small, he has filled the whole world. But the Divine Mercy gathered up the fragments from every side, forged them in the fire of love and welded into one what had been broken. . . .