Remoralizing Sex
Christine Emba’s recent book attempts to diagnose the malaise of contemporary sex culture. But her persistent avoidance of queer experience and theory, as well as an insufficient analysis of capitalism, thwarts her attempt at a new sexual ethic beyond consent.
The Political Theology of Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman’s ideas continue to exercise a profound influence on our political and economic imagination. On the sixtieth anniversary of Capitalism and Freedom, Adam Kotsko explores the uncanny relationship between Friedman’s neoliberalism and Christian theology.
What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?
Frederick Douglass’ famous Independence Day address took a rhetorical scalpel to the lofty self-image and founding texts of America. With political and religious fervor, he drove home the contradiction between republican values and chattel slavery.
The Only Way Out Is Through
In this exhausted political moment, a reactionary antipolitics is ascendent — one that looks to “traditional” aesthetic and religious pursuits as an antidote to the spiritual dead-end of conventional “woke” liberalism and free-market conservatism.
The Predator Class is Hungry for a Post-Roe World
From gendered exclusions to the explicitly carceral capitalism of sharecropping, the predator class squeezed profit from precarity. It is one lesson they have not forgotten despite their erasure of slavery and its afterlives from public memory.
Gays Behaving Badly
A new book from the creators of the Bad Gays podcast explores the morally problematic lives of queer people from ancient to modern times. What unites these figures isn’t their “transgressiveness” but their persistent refusal of solidarity.
Solidarity With Trans Lives is How We Fight the Right
Conservatives are uniting behind a neofascist project and trans people are a prime target for violence. The Church can’t settle for anything less than costly solidarity with trans lives, claiming political conflict as a necessary consequence of Christian love.
Solidarity With Trans Lives is How We Fight the Right
Conservatives are uniting behind a neofascist project and trans people are a prime target for violence. The Church can’t settle for anything less than costly solidarity with trans lives. We must claim political conflict as a necessary consequence of Christian love.
It’s Not Enough to End Private Prisons. We Need a World Without Prisons.
One day while discussing the campaign with another student organizer, I made a comment referencing the urgent need to end private prisons. “Yes,” she said, “but we also want to end all prisons.”
It’s Not Enough to End Private Prisons. We Need a World Without Prisons
Private prisons aren’t the primary problem, nor is ending them the solution. Instead, we need a mass movement to abolish the prison industrial complex and transform the conditions that make incarceration thinkable in the first place.