November 13, 2011

Broadcast Date: 
Nov 13 2011

In Part IV of our series on GOP candidates' religious affiliations, Anthea Butler looks at the spiritual life of the one and only Herman Cain. Belén Fernandez deconstructs 30 years of terrible writing by Thomas Friedman. And Adina Hoffman celebrates the life of renowned Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, who died last month.

Episode segments
  • Herman Cain and the Black Church
    National Politics, Christian Right, Electoral
    Anthea Butler is a professor of Religious Studies and the Graduate Chair of Religion at the University of Pennsylvania. She also writes for the magazine Religion Dispatches.
    Kiera Feldman

    Part IV in our series on the religious beliefs and affiliatons of the GOP presidential candidates looks at Herman Cain's complicated relationship with his historically progressive black Baptist church.

  • Deconstructing Thomas Friedman
    Iraq War, National Politics, International Politics, Middle East, Israel/Palestine, News media
    Belén Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, out from Verso this month. She is also an editor and writer at Pulse Media and a contributor to publications including Al Jazeera and CounterPunch.
    Marissa Brostoff

    Thomas Friedman's Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times column and his bestselling books are pompous, grating, and disturbingly influential in their linkage of a neoliberal economic ideology to a neoconservative brand of foreign policy. Fernandez elaborates on her hilarious but sobering takedown.

  • Taha Muhammad Ali, 1931-2001
    Israel/Palestine, Arts & Culture, Occupation, Literature
    Essayist, critic, and editor Adina Hoffman is the author of My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century.
    Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Ali, who died last month, was one of the most acclaimed Palestinian poets of his generation. To commemorate his life and work, we replay a 2009 conversation with Hoffman, whose study of Ali was the first English-language biography of a Palestinian writer.