Evander Holyfield Allegedly Beats Wife. Reason? Tithing.
Boxer’s wife obtains temporary restraining order.
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Missionary Imposition: Idaho Baptists Charged With Kidnapping 33 Haitian Children
Had the inexperienced Idaho missionaries read so much as Haiti’s Wikipedia page they would have learned that the nation has a history of slavery, colonialism, and missions that warns against attempts to remove Haitian children from their home.
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Disney’s Lump of Coal
Disney’s The Princess and the Frog picks up where Katrina left off. The movie is a wholesale desecration of New Orleans, Creole culture, Cajun culture, religion, zydeco, and even Louis Armstrong.
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Oral Roberts, Pioneering Televangelist, Dies
Before there was Falwell, Robertson, Bakker, or the Crouches, there was Oral Roberts, the iconoclastic pioneer of televangelism.
Read MoreTiger’s Confession: Maybe Marriage Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be
Tiger Woods has admitted being serially unfaithful to his wife. What does this have to do with religion? Try the themes of transgression, confession, and the institution of marriage.
Read MoreSarah Palin: Bus Tour of Destruction
By the time this book tour is finished, she will have succeeded in splitting the republican party, solidifying a new hard right religious base, and making enough money to turn Alaska into the New Jerusalem.
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Good Hair, Good God! The Divine Politics of African-American Hair
Chris Rock’s new documentary scrutinizes the politics and pathos of black hair care: from the beauty salon to the hair show, and from chemical relaxers to the Indian hair that fuels the hair weave industry.
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Along Came a Spider: What the Pope Doesn’t See
In the official “Year for Priests,” dedicated by Pope Benedict, a priest in Florida has upped the ante on clerical malfeasance, allegedly fathering a child with a stripper, and threatening the woman with violence. What will it take for the Catholic Church to begin to take responsibility for priests gone wild?
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Heresy, Bad Taste, or Capitalist Adventure: Is it Still Pentecostalism?
In this chronicle of mutations within the Pentecostal movement, we learn to distinguish among the Prosperity Gospel, Word of Faith, and New Apostolic Movements—and we learn why it matters.
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Prosperity, Spiritual Warfare, and the ‘On-Demand’ God
Given that so many powerful Pentecostals and Charismatics, like Senator John Ensign and Sarah Palin, are embroiled in high-profile scandals, one might expect to hear more about the movements that unite them. Anthea Butler, a leading scholar on Pentecostalism and American religious history, traces the various movements and their theologies of wealth, healing, and dominion.
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