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Republican Scandals Drag Secretive ‘Family’ Into the Big Time

By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston

…opportunity. One might say I’m being naive, that American power must make deals with the devil. I’ll grant that; but which devil? And on what terms? The elite fundamentalism exemplified by The Family has blinded even the best-intentioned among us to those questions. One such example is former Representative Tony Hall, a Democrat from Ohio who through his involvement with The Family became anti-abortion and anti-queer, a friend and legislative sup…

The Best Books Media of 2008

By Jeff Sharlet

…’s new album, The Chemistry of Common Life, will probably show up on some “best of” lists compiled by hardcore fans, other texts selected, such as Patton Dodd’s “poem” “Sally,” would probably go unheralded were it not for this eccentric compilation of the year’s most intriguing texts, a veritable Venn diagram of overlapping ideas, enthusiasms, and fellow traveling. It’s the most honest “best of” list you’ll find. —Jeff Sharlet *** Speaking in Tong…

Taking Evangelical Support of Israel at Face Value Is a Terrible Idea: A Response

By Chrissy Stroop

…istian Zionism, and its usually concomitant apocalypticism, of “paranoia.” Best even dismissed prominent evangelical author and pastor John Hagee’s view that God ostensibly used Hitler to forward his divine plan of gathering the Jews in Israel as mere “dabbling in anti-Semitism.” As I argued in a rebuttal likewise published by The Forward, Best’s breezy, dismissive whitewashing of the more unseemly aspects of evangelicals’ support for (the most ag…

Silence of Latino Religious Leaders Enable GOP Tolerance of Trump Spectacle

By Arlene M. Sanchez Walsh

…e is the GOP now, whose branding with Latino/a voters was next to nil? The best-case scenario is that it can’t get any worse. And where are the religious leaders who’ve dedicated a significant portion of their cache to claims that they can work with the GOP and get them to tone down the invective against their church members? Well, there are always those spurious religious freedom cases to rally around, making sure the local panaderia doesn’t make…

First Baptist Church, Sutherland Springs Texas

Can Government Solve The Evil Of Mass Shootings? A Response to Mollie Hemingway

By Daniel Schultz

…hr said. More important, as in all things, God is at work to bring out the best, even in the worst of circumstances. At a minimum, you can’t read the prophets and not see how God pushes human leaders to do better—through humans themselves. Remember that whole thing about “Let justice roll down like mighty waters?” That’s the prophet Amos telling his king to stop making edgy foreign-policy deals and concentrate on feeding people at home. It’s not G…

Soccer and the Sublime in the Shadow of Apartheid

By Preston Davis

…of ill-natured activity abounds: murders, further death threats, back-door deals, and fundamental greed, all at the expense of locals. Which brings us to the paradox of it all. The tournament starts today. For good or ill, the tournament’s eminence has vanquished concerns of these less noble attributes, even for the locals of Nelspruit. The game will unify people, and mollify hardship for the present. It will not end it, but it provides a respite….

CNN Editor Leaves Over Tweet on Hezbollah ‘Giant’

By Hussein Rashid

…ly a democratically elected party in Lebanon, with which the US government deals with on a regular basis. Unfortunately, CNN fell into pattern and abandoned one of their reporters instead of standing up for her. Initially, CNN even refused toexplain what Nasr had done wrong, quoting a super-secret social media policy that even they are not fully aware of. Eventually, the decision was made that their reporters in America are not as free as American…

At This Week’s Meeting, Will SBC Vote For Voddie Baucham, The Homeschooling ‘Star’ Who Embraces the Right Wing Theology at the Heart of the Abuse Scandal?

By R.L. Stollar

…d by evangelical parents who continue to promote Baucham today, states she deals with “ongoing anger from religious trauma syndrome” and has left religion entirely. These impacts are still felt today for many of these survivors. “I have been out for almost a decade,” West explains, “and I am still dealing with PTSD from the abuse I experienced, abuse that was fueled by [Baucham’s] teaching of biblical patriarchy.” Of course, these are personal sto…

RDBook: The End of the World As We Know It

By Gabriel Mckee

…end language. Elsewhere the cause of the apocalypse is ambiguous—something best illustrated in Gene Wolfe’s “Mute,” in which two children watch news reports about a mysterious disaster on a television with no sound. They know the world is falling apart, but they don’t know how or why. Despite this parade of nightmares, there’s a pervasive sense of optimism in these stories—an optimism that, paradoxically, lies at the heart of all post-apocalyptic…

A Devil’s Dozen of the Best ‘New Religion Journalism’ Books of the Decade

By Ed Simon

…ded within the Occupy movement (arguably its own religious revival, in the best of ways), Nathan Schneider’s God in Proof is the rare religion nonfiction book that doesn’t just use the tools of New Religion Journalism to write about ritual, belief, or identity, but to actually get into the syllogisms as it were, and to investigate theology. God in Proof concerns with the ways in which philosophers from St. Anselm to René Descartes, St. Thomas Aqui…