Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
For many viewers of the Super Bowl, one ad amid the beer and tax software and car commercials may be particularly surprising. It might look something like this: A guitar strums a melancholy tune. Black and white photos, depicting mothers, fathers, and sons living in what looks to be impoverished Central American towns, cycle through….
What happens when white supremacists on the hate site Stormfront learn that they’re not as white as they thought? Two researchers investigated. ImageMembers of the National Socialist Movement en route to a rally in Little Rock, Ark., last year. A new study looked at white nationalists’ responses to their sometimes surprising DNA test results.CreditCreditJim…
A series of explosions ripped through the island nation of Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, killing 207 people and injuring at least 450 in the worst terrorist attacks since a lengthy civil war ended a decade ago. Eight bombs exploded, several of them detonated by suicide bombers, at luxury hotels, churches, and other locations. In…
ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE — Pope Francis said on Tuesday that the Roman Catholic Church had faced a persistent problem of sexual abuse of nuns by priests and even bishops, the first time he has publicly acknowledged the issue. Catholic nuns have accused clerics of sexual abuse in recent years in India, Africa, Latin America…
ImagePope Francis meeting with nuns last year at the Vatican.CreditCreditVincenzo Pinto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images ROME — The sexual abuse of nuns and religious women by Catholic priests and bishops — and the abortions that have sometimes resulted — has for years been overshadowed by other scandals in the Roman Catholic Church. That seemed to…
InNovember 2017, the Hallmark Channel released a movie called The Christmas Train, in which a Spielbergian movie producer (Danny Glover) stuffs a cross-country train full of actors to dupe two former war correspondents (Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Dermot Mulroney) into falling in love again. It also strongly implies that Glover is God. The night it aired, the movie…
It was immediately clear that change was afoot in Dallas. I’ve attended the annual gatherings of the Southern Baptist Convention dozens of times, but walking around the convention center this week, I was struck by how unfamiliar it all felt. When I was a child, the convention hall was a sea of silver combovers and…
It has become something of a commonplace to say that Mike Pence belongs to another era. He is a politician whom the New York Times has called a “throwback,” a “conservative proudly out of sync with his times,” and a “dangerous anachronism,” a man whose social policies and outspoken Christian faith are so redolent of…
Credit Nicolas Ortega To hear the Christian right tell it, President Trump should be a candidate for sainthood — that is, if evangelicals believed in saints. “Never in my lifetime have we had a Potus willing to take such a strong outspoken stand for the Christian faith like Donald Trump,” tweeted Franklin Graham, the son…
Several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists carrying torches march in a parade at the University of Virginia. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post) Jews and non-Jews are drawn to debates about whether Jews are white. It’s the sort of question that captivates academics and activists, roping in everyone from Israeli “Wonder Woman” actress Gal…