Features
Devil in the details: When faith is ruled by fear
People say ‘God is dead.’ But how can they say that when I show them the devil?”
So asks Emily Rose in a note read after her death in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Emily explains from beyond the grave that the Virgin Mary appeared to her and offered to end her demonic possession by taking her life. But Emily chose to suffer in order to show the world that demons are real—and teach us that we’d all better behave.
Unsafe sex: Still watching 'Sex and the City'
My husband and I have acquired the somewhat embarrassing habit of settling down on the couch to watch reruns of Sex and the City. Despite having aired its final episode on HBO a few years ago, SATC continues to intrigue Americans, who are buying the series on DVD and watching episodes on cable TV. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the way the show trades deftly on contemporary anxieties about being single, looking perfect and growing older.
High tea: When law and religious practice conflict
Local color: American religion, region by region
Celebrity reporter
Based on Gerald Clarke’s exhaustive biography, Bennett Miller’s Capote covers the six years that Truman Capote spent working on In Cold Blood. The film begins at a noisy New York cocktail party where Capote is the center of attention, regaling his friends with humorous anecdotes and observations. Then he runs across a newspaper article about the murder of four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. He calls William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, to say that he wants to go to Kansas to write about this story.
Books
The Methodist story
Hard right
In their book, Off Center, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson use statistics to prove that the Republicans have defied political gravity. Instead of trimming their sails to the moderate breezes of the American middle, the Republicans have lurched far to the right. “According to the conventional wisdom about American politics, this shouldn’t be possible,” write Hacker and Pierson.
The Age of Anxiety
Departments
Staying power: Heim at the helm
Court choices: Roe and Republican strategy
The first face: The miracle of Phacops rana
Holy and digital: Mass frenzy
News
Century Marks
Leap of imagination: Christopher Herbert, the Anglican bishop of St. Alban’s, is troubled by strident Christian voices. “There is a noisy, almost angry, literalism around desires to define and codify who is, or who is not, a ‘real Christian,’ and what seems to accompany this is a plodding, narrow biblicism which is punitive in tone and joyless in character.” Apprehending the beauty and truth of God, which involves paradox and apparent contradiction, takes faith, but also playfulness and imagination (Anglican Theological Review, summer).