Benjamin J. Dueholm

Ritual actions can linger, even as belief fades in and out.

The swift and unexpected political demise of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) at the hands of his own party’s primary electorate last night has already called forth endless analysis. Beaten by an economics professor who ran on a shoestring and whose major source of institutional support came from talk radio hosts, Cantor has been charged variously with focusing too much on preparing to be the next House speaker, with running an ineffective campaign that spent no money on voter contact but $200,000 on steakhouses, with being too soft on immigrants (Cantor proposed a path to legal status for immigrants brought into the country illegally as children), and with being too negative and unfair in his campaign ads. There is even speculation that Cantor was defeated by Democrats voting in Virginia’s open primary. Whatever the mix of factors, the primary defeat of a House majority leader—something that has apparently never happened in the 115-year history of that office—indicates a politician, and a party, caught sleeping by a restless electorate.

There's a growing consensus that we should stop treating people who sell sex as criminals. But that's about where the consensus ends.

Lincoln turned toward the philosophical case for abolition for the same reason Roosevelt turned toward the Four Freedoms: because so much death could not be allowed to leave the world untransfigured.

Battery Park's carnival atmosphere was just what my family was looking for. We needed to be somewhere with fresh, crass air—far from our parsonage home.

A few friendly pointers

My grandmother died in 2005, on the eve of the feast of Saints Mary and Martha of Bethany. The next day I went to the weekday eucharist at St. James Cathedral in Chicago, and the story of Martha and her sister brought me instantly to tears. Like so many women of her generation (and not only hers), my grandmother was deeply identified with her hospitality and service. She was a lot like Martha, and I loved her for it. I am more troubled now than I was then at the way this story is gendered in our reading.

Amos 7:7-17

Pulling the beam from one’s eye is not an afternoon's task. It takes a whole life of faith—and Alan Chambers's faithful words offer an honest example.

In The Sea and the Mirror, W.H. Auden audaciously wrote new poems in the voices of each character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, all set after the action of the play concludes. The result is a work both wonderfully reverent and plainly modern—you might even call it modern in its reverence. I would have hoped that anyone presuming to put out a book called A New New Testament would borrow Auden’s approach and give us a genuine literary and theological invention.

When my senior colleague proposed a ten-week sermon series on the saints, I was hesitant. Would anyone find this interesting?

The NFL gambled on fans’ willingness to endure the replacement refs. It was wrong—a good development for whatever ethical margin a football fan might claim.

A sociologist might see in football a society's need to control and ritualize violence. The church fathers, however, weren't much for sociologists.

There's a danger in making veterans into secular saints. The saints don’t need us to give their deaths meaning; they died fully rewarded.

On Sunday night I went to hear Dan Savage speak about the It Gets Better Project. The last time I saw him was 2003, if memory serves, in front of a crowd of perhaps a hundred. At one point Savage took a break from promoting his new book Skipping Toward Gomorrah to refer his audience to the now-famous New Republic cover story "The Liberal Case for War" (against Iraq). It was a good talk, funny and engaging, and it made a striking contrast with his Sunday appearance.

Redistributing wealth is what all public budgets do. The question is whether a given type of redistribution promotes justice and decency.

Michele Bachmann's frontrunner moment may be past. But she has shown how the Republicans can win in the restless small towns of the swing-state Midwest.