"That confusion—the inability to tell the difference between God and King Herod—explains much of Huckabee's ideology."
"When you take this reality of everyone measuring everyone else’s prayer mat to ensure it is the appropriate size...and you combine it with the millenialistic/apocalyptic component, then for all its strength ISIS becomes quite weak."
So much religious talk is about naming, about describing a general reality in particular terms. This is important. But in our increasingly secular culture, it’s always striking when someone gets at deep religious truth without bothering with religious language.
For instance, Jay Smooth offers a pretty crisp explication here of the nature of sin and virtue.
Alyssa Rosenberg makes a smart point about the FX show The Americans, a drama about a married pair of KGB agents working undercover in early-80s metro D.C. Their two teenage children are unaware of what their parents do, and the older one, Paige, becomes a devoted churchgoer.
Some small good news for American low-wage workers: Walmart is increasing its wages at the low end. By April, no Walmart employee will make less than $9 an hour; a year from now it’ll be $10. The retailer is also moving to improve its scheduling practices, a source of worker complaints.
Walmart’s decision is a voluntary one, made for business reasons.
"The American public sphere is exactly the wrong place to try to hold a conversation on the authenticity of a group’s religious bona fides."
"The Christian church universal has been slow to respond to marriage's changing nature."
This is a really smart anlysis of how Jeb Bush is positioning himself in the buildup to the 2016 presidential election: he's running for "mayor of America."
Unfortunately for Bush, Matthew Yglesias explains, the federal government is not like a local or state government but bigger. It is more like, in Paul Krugman's memorable phrase, an insurance company with an army. Yglesias continues:
"If Ross's argument enjoys the virtue of sobriety, it is still injured by the vice of being wrong."
"ISIS is doing nothing that wasn’t widely done in the United States to black people until well within living memory."
Chuck Todd may be right: Obama doesn’t like the National Prayer Breakfast, so he uses his speech to stir up trouble there. I don’t like it either. But it’s astonishing that this counts as trouble.
It’s pretty clear that vaccination views don’t break down on partisan lines. Elizabeth Stoker Breunig is no doubt right that good old American individualism motivates many people’s refusal to take major risks to other people as seriously as minor risks to themselves. But not all of them. (It’s hard to generalize about anti-vaxxers.) And individualism itself of course exists across much of the political spectrum.
Nor is support for specifically mandatory vaccines found mostly just among us liberals, with our comparative comfort with statism. And some of the best things I’ve read on this have been by right-leaning commentators.
"The 'all too often' could just as well be 'almost always.'"
"The Mormons who participate in these mixed-orientation relationships increasingly appeal to ideas of sexuality that are similar to postmodern theories of sexual fluidity."