Rap Sheet
Links on R&P from around the web
Take It from a Soldier: On Kevin Powers’s “Yellow Birds”
posted on November 12, 2012At The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nathan Deuel reviews Kevin Powers’s critically-acclaimed war novel, The Yellow Birds. “War sucks. We all agree,” writes Deuel. But those who don’t fight remain at a distance from the horror of war. “[W]e rely on literary writers to go beyond the news reports and political grandstanding to take us deeper, to let us see and feel the horror,” Deuel continues. “Former Army machine-gunner Powers, who fought and maybe killed, and also studied poetry, shows from his opening line—’The war tried to kill us in the spring’—that he intends to wrestle not only with the big stuff, but to bring us into the ring.”
Read at Los Angeles Review of Books
The Looming Sunni-Shia Crisis
posted on November 12, 2012The American Conservative’s Kelly Vlahos writes that, “No one—not Washington, nor the establishment press—seems ready to confront the Sunni-Shia conflagration that threatens to rock whatever narrow foreign policy hold the U.S. has in the … [Muslim world], promising a bleak landscape of war for years to come.” Vlahos argues that the Arab Spring, in places like Bahrain and Syria, did not usher in democracy, but instead intra-religious tensions that could “spillover from the Syrian conflict [and] could wreak havoc on places already made fragile by years of war, poverty, and corruption.”
Read at The American Conservative
A Reformed Republican Party
posted on November 12, 2012The Washington Post’s George Will argues that the reason for the Republicans’ defeat in the presidential election is that the GOP chose the wrong candidate to carry its message. Will points out that half of the American electorate “embraced their message more warmly than it did this year’s messenger.” “Romney was a diligent warrior,” writes WIll. “Next time, Republicans need a more likable one.”
What All Those Jesus Jokes Tell Us
posted on November 12, 2012At CNN, Ed Blum and Paul Harvey describe the underlying meaning behind, and purpose of “Jesus jokes.” “The Jesus jokes not only reveal how tangled our religious, racial, economic and political positions have become,” write Blum and Harvey, “but also how many outlets there are for the jokes. In these tense times, when presidential hopefuls point fingers at one another and families unfriend one another over political and cultural differences, laughing may be one way to talk about the problems without killing one another.”
Toward an Irrelevant Faith: Reflecting On Conservative Christianity And The Elections
posted on November 12, 2012Andre E. Johnson writes at The Huffington Post that, after years as a major force in American politics, conservative Christianity is increasingly becoming politically irrelevant. “Conservative ideology and its kissing cousin, conservative theology, has always been about maintaining the status quo; clogging up progress, grinding the forces of change,” which, in a nation that is changing rapidly, both religiously and demographically, does not equate to election success. “While both of these conservative groups, in an ideal world, have an opportunity to reshape and reconfigure their theological thought processes, chances are that they will not take advantage of the opportunity.”
Military Atheists
posted on November 12, 2012At SpokaneFAVS, Sandy Williams asks, “Is it possible to be an atheist and serve your country in the military?” Jason Torpy believes it is. Williams profiles Torpy, who is a graduate of West Point, a retired Army captain, and “the President of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers (MAAF), a national non-profit building community for atheists and humanists in the military.”
An Open Letter To Pro-Lifers
posted on November 12, 2012At First Things Michael J. New pens a letter to his fellow “pro-lifers,” following the defeat of many pro-life candidates in last week’s election, most notably Mitt Romney. New acknowledges, “The results of Tuesday’s presidential election were certainly disappointing,” especially since President Obama “might get the opportunity to appoint as many as four new” justicies to the Supreme Court, whom News assumes will back Roe. v. Wade. Yet New insists that the pro-life movement shouldn’t dispair. “The number of abortions has declined from 1.6 million in 1990 to about 1.2 million in 2008. That is 1.2 million too many. But it is also a 25 percent decline.”
Election 2012: A New Day for Religion in America
posted on November 9, 2012At The Huffington Post, Paul Brandeis Raushenbush considers the importance of Tuesday’s election for religion. Rausenbush believes that the results usher in a “new religious vision for America,” one that emphasizes religious freedom over traditional religious hierarchy. Raushenbush writes, “The 2012 elections soundly defeated one brand of religion as another vision for religious expression showed its strength and promise.”
What’s Next for Religious Conservatives?
posted on November 9, 2012David Gibson for Religion News Service looks at the internal battle among Christian conservatives following the group’s resounding election losses on Tuesday. Some are blaming the loss on Romney’s campaign, while others believe that Christian conservatives must be willing to appeal to a broader base. On Wednesday, Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said, “My message really today is we have more work to do to become more diverse, but the party has to start building bridges and practicing the politics of addition to bring more people in.”
Why the Great Religious Realignment is a Great Secular Opportunity
posted on November 9, 2012At Religion Dispatches, Sarah Posner considers the future role of religion in politics following this year’s election. Posner believes that the election demonstrates that the country is experiencing a “great religious realignment,” a shift towards a greater focus on secularism. Posner writes the the election “results show exactly why Democrats have a huge opportunity to make a counter-argument on religious freedom: that secular government and secular campaigning ensure everyone’s religious freedom, by not giving one religious view … precedence over another.”