…nt of his classmates, he was acquitted. An April 30, 1866 editorial in the New York Times argued against students carrying pistols, citing “…pistols being dropped on the floor at balls or being exploded in very inconvenient ways. A boy of 12 has his pantaloons made with a pistol pocket; and this at a boarding-school filled with boys, who, we suppose, do or wish to do the same thing. We would advise parents to look into it, and learn whether shooti…
…an King Cyrus, who freed Jewish prisoners and helped build the temple in Jerusalem. This provided evangelicals with a remarkable escape hatch from the political and moral norms that previously governed most evangelical engagement in public life. These two elements also animate the NAR’s activities internationally. ‘It’s a 7M world’ In his book, God’s Chaos Code, 7 Mountains strategist and NAR thought leader Lance Wallnau (who is an apostle in Ché…
…“Christian Woodstock” hosted by the conservative evangelical group Campus Crusade for Christ, packed an estimated 80,000 young believers into Dallas’s Cotton Bowl. (Attendance swelled to 250,000 on the day Kris Kristofferson performed.) The Jesus Freaks’ ad-hoc theology could be summed up in two words: solus Jesus (“Jesus alone”), a “radically Jesus-centric” Christianity (to borrow a phrase from the religious historian Stephen Prothero) that privi…
…ah’s end—and some pointing out that the only time zone to worry about is Jerusalem’s, meaning that a global cataclysm at dawn on the 23rd would chip ten good hours off of Los Angeles’s Friday). As true in ancient Babylonia as it is today, the creativity of cooptation and the capacious approach to claim-making is how religious thought happens. For some, this weekend’s apocalypse involves a planet called Nibiru, but for others, notably various Chris…
…hese parts of ourselves. But the much greater cost is in claiming them. To live fully. To live wholly, but still to be able to say “girl you have to get yur hur did” is beyond the scope, I’m sure, of many of you readers. But that is what it is. Because Prof. Ibrahim and I are also in the same age group, we really have a lot more to work with. It’s almost like we grew up together. We can academize and hang. Even having iftar together was par for th…
…before about the far-right anti-abortion group’s willingness to bend the truth for attention. Just this year, the home of Personhood USA’s Keith Mason and his family was vandalized. The organization put out a press release blaming “abortion fanatics,” who had forced the Masons into hiding. But when asked about the incident, a police spokesperson said the ‘person of interest’ in the case had personal—not political—motivations. The group also has a…
…lesbian kiss scene in the first episode of the new season of Dr. Who. The BBC Worldwide’s London-based compliance team made the cut to conform with laws against same-sex relations and broadcast content in Asian countries such as Muslim majority Malaysia and Indonesia. Viewers in South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore also watched the same censored version…. Jeanne Leong, director of communications at BBC Worldwide Asia, said as an internatio…
…ng James translation Bible in an “easy-to-read” format, the “God Bless the USA Bible” (GBUSA) also includes: the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and The Pledge of Allegiance. Of course, the GBUSA isn’t the first to make an explicit connection between the Bible and the founding documents of the US. The American Patriot’s Bible (2009) features the New King James translation paired with inserts on Christian theol…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…dentity, a manhood purged of anything feminine. Consider the young purity crusaders I write about in chapter 13, “The Romance of American Fundamentalism.” They’re smart, hip, engaging kids; they scoff at the old Christian Right war chiefs, they live in Brooklyn and worship in Manhattan, they don’t like Bush—and they’re dedicated to an ideology that in its emphasis on “purity” above all is potentially farther right than anything Bush has ever dream…
…Shortly after Reza Aslan and Hasan Minhaj’s, “An Open Letter to American Muslims,” was first published on RD this past Tuesday, it became clear that it had launched a critical discussion across the United States. But now, as the subject of BBC’s “World Have Your Say” program (sorry, programme), the letter has jumped our nation’s borders and launched the discussion across the world:…
