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Death in the Desert: Riding With the Samaritans

By Lauri Lebo

…grants from their homes. They are pulled to the U.S. because of demand for cheap labor. One of the major pushes came in the ’90s with the passage of NAFTA, which opened the door to many agri-businesses to move farms down to Mexico, putting small farmers out of business. And while the number of undocumented border crossers is down, Brother David says, it will be virtually impossible to eliminate them as long as the opportunities for jobs exist. As…

McCarthy, Born Again and Retooled for Our Time

By Sarah Posner

…” as his devotees call him, is the doyen of Summit Ministries, the Manitou Springs, Colorado-based institution founded in 1962 to teach evangelical teens about anti-God, anti-Christian threats to the “Christian worldview” and the American way of life. In his seminal textbook, Understanding the Times, Noebel lays out six “worldviews”—Christianity, Islam, secular humanism, Marxism-Leninism, cosmic humanism, and post-modernism—vying for domination in…

Layoffs on the Religious Right

By Bill Berkowitz

…media (both mainstream and alternative), Moon continues to move ahead on a number of fronts. His Washington Times continues to be the daily house-organ/must-read for conservatives; he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting right-wing organizations and causes; he controls the US sushi industry; he does business with North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il: and as Moon watchdog John Gorenfeld has reported, Moon officially considers himself Emperor o…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…sonry was part of the process that democratized and liberalized Europe and North America through a wave of revolutions. The Masonic faith laid the foundations for modern ideology: belief in each person’s and each nation’s right to run their own affairs, in the unlimited power of the human intellect, in the continuing forward march of history, and in the boundless ability of science to solve the mysteries of the universe. In the lodges, these belie…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…ith formal, centralized leadership. With access to drug money, oil wealth, cheap weapons, and consumer-grade digital toys, they don’t have to worry that 93% of people in the Muslim world still refuse to condone the 9/11 attacks. No one can control them: not their communities, their politicians, their leading clerics, nor even their ostensible figurehead, bin Laden himself. When forced out of one area, the fighters re-create another in their own im…

Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

By Sarah Posner

…ing regular trips to their multi-million chalet-style mansion in Steamboat Springs, Colo. • Tony Palmer, a former employee of Copeland, is ordained with the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches (CEEC), a small offshoot unrelated to the main Episcopal denomination. The CEEC also ordained Gene Ewing, creator of St. Matthew’s Churches, who for decades has been running a direct-mail operation sending out gaudy, gimmicky letters (with prayer clo…

Elephant Orphans and Ecological Spiritualities: An Earth Day Reflection

By Jacob J. Erickson

…ysteries of these creatures. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. A large number of the “spiritual but not religious” crowd in the West are self-proclaimed ecologists or naturalists. A large number of atheists and agnostics are deeply passionate about ecological ethics, or how we might be more “in tune” with nature. Culturally, they become fascinated in the personalities of cats and cat videos, the companionship of dogs who offer a kind of faithf…

Religious Affiliation, ‘Mankind’: India’s Anti-Corruption Activist Leads Second Freedom Struggle

By April L. Bogle

…good move. When I got to the lobby another something told me to dig out my phone and check it for messages. Sure enough, I had one from an unfamiliar number. A woman’s voice said Bedi was still sleeping, exhausted from the previous day’s overseas flight, and needed to reschedule our interview for that afternoon. I called the number back, convinced the opportunity was lost. “I’m here at the hotel now, but I’m booked solid this afternoon—” “Hold on,…

Yes, It Can Be Hard to Be an Atheist in America; Now We Have the Data

By Chrissy Stroop

…saulted over their unbelief, although for African-American respondents the number is 2.5%. Meanwhile, 12% of respondents experienced threats of violence, and 2.5% experienced vandalism (14.2% and 3.2%, respectively, for Latinx respondents). None of these facts make the experience of “coming out” as nonreligious the same as coming out as LGBTQ, but they do nonetheless show that disclosing one’s nonreligious identity can be fraught and risky dependi…

Malta Adopts Marriage Equality Over Objections of Catholics and Evangelicals; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ated having attended the recent General Assembly of the Anglican Church of North America, the group that split from the Episcopal Church over the role of women and LGBT people in the church. He welcomed the consecration of Andy Lines as “a missionary bishop for Europe.” He said the event gave “a wonderful sense of what the Anglican Communion can become, a truly global partnership in the gospel which is able to ‘lift up its voice’ without confusion…