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Cartoon by Emily Flake. For more from this issue: http://nyr.kr/14ve6ZN
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Cartoon by David Sipress. For more: http://nyr.kr/YWFWMF
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Cartoon by Danny Shanahan. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/Xfyeyu
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Cartoon by Drew Dernavich. For more: http://nyr.kr/YdkWV9
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Cartoon by Zachary Kanin. For more:http://nyr.kr/S6Dn9Z
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Cartoon of the night by Carolita Johnson. For more: http://nyr.kr/QKkpmH
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For Heaven’s Sake
Where does God fit in on the 2012 campaign trail? In Comment this week, Hendrik Hertzberg considers the reaction provoked by the omission—and subsequent insertion—of the word “God” in the Democratic platform:
[B]y the time the Democrats were streaming out of Charlotte the Fox folks had mentioned the aforementioned non-mention eighty-four times. “I think it’s rather peculiar,” Paul Ryan, the Vice-Presidential nominee, said in one segment. “There sure is a lot of mention of government, and so I guess I would just put the onus of the burden on them to answer why they did all of these purges of God.” Ryan’s running mate, for his part, had previously judged it unwise to cast aspersions on other people’s religious beliefs. A few days later, though, having experienced a post-Conventions dip in the polls, Mitt Romney decided what the hell.
Did Romney’s subsequent attack on the Democrats establish him as the candidate of faith? And what does this incident say about the role of religion in American politics today? Click-through to read the full Comment.
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A Saturday morning cartoon. Don’t forget to enter this week’s caption contest: http://nyr.kr/r46had
How is your bracket holding up?
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Cartoon of the day. For more cartoons from this week’s issue: http://www.newyorker.com/humor
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"The interplay between prosperity—and poverty—and religious observance has become a recent fascination of a small number of economists and other social scientists, for understanding these patterns can help us better predict the future. Do hard times produce more fundamentalists? Do prosperous times produce more do-gooders? Will a lengthy economic slump pull people into the pews to pray for jobs and ladle soup for needier neighbors? Or will it keep people at home on the couch, nursing psychic wounds and cursing their creator?"
—Lisa Miller, on whether recessions make us more religious. (via newsweek)
Good questions, Lisa. Also, read Nick Paumgarten’s piece asking why people view tragedies as “acts of God”:
“Questions of agency, divine or otherwise, dog us these early-summer days, amid a pileup of ill tidings: an intractable war; hints, once again, of economic depression; the deep-sea oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Who’s to blame? Who’s in charge? On the day of the Mayor’s pronouncement, a technician who is working with British Petroleum to drill relief wells told the Times, in response to questions about the state of the damaged well, and about the prospects for fixing it, ‘No human being alive can know the answers.’ A line like that could put a man in a theological mood—especially on the heels of the technician’s previous remark, a triumph of the triple negative: ‘I won’t say there haven’t been relief wells that haven’t worked.’”
