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As U.S. Went to Hell, R.E.M. Hung in Without Cynicism

By Brian K. Pennington

…very day that the state of Georgia, who also gave us R.E.M., conducted a brutally cold execution as the world looked on in disbelief, nothing might have seemed more insignificant than the retirement of a few wealthy, successful rock stars. But maybe it was a response fully in line with the band’s often unspoken religiosity. Take that video, for example [scroll down to watch]: has there ever been 4 minutes of pop culture as spiritually powerful as…

Romney Braces for Perry Testosterone Challenge; Huntsman Reboots

By Joanna Brooks

…ing? Can Mitt keep his awkward sense of humor in check and hold on to frontrunner status? If Texas Jesus does tell Rick Perry to run on August 6, it’s going to be a long Republican primary death match. Because one thing we know about Mitt: he’s not going to surrender any time soon, and he’s amassing the cash to make it happen. As we like to remember (especially on July 24—Happy Pioneer Day to RD’s Mormon readers!), persistence is a Mormon trait. E…

Will a Video Game Make Sense of Qaddafi’s Death?

By Rachel Wagner

…vigorously defend our myopia even as we deny we have it. We see only those news stories we wish to see, and we see them in as fragmented a form as we wish. This, we claim, is “freedom.” We often feel we need know nothing at all of the historical or social situations that give rise to important climactic moments in countries other than our own. How many of the people who play the Kuma Games Qaddafi mission will know much more of the story than what…

Graham’s Muslim Brotherhood Conspiracy Theory Not New

By Sarah Posner

…with this imaginary threat. At the Capitol Visitors Center event, David Yerushalmi, general counsel for the CSP—who has called for banning Muslims from America and written that whites are genetically superior to blacks—portrayed President Obama as an emissary to this world of secret codes and seditious intent, and his much-lauded religious freedom speech in Cairo as evidence of that. . . . [National Review contributor Andrew] McCarthy, author of…

Facebook Doesn’t Kill Churches, Churches Kill Churches

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ust probably not on the John Paul II Facebook page. The page, which offers videos highlights from the life of John Paul II, has garnered an impressive amount of global traffic. Alas, the fact that more than 13,000 around the world “liked” the page in the first days it was up does not mean that it is enriching or extending relationships. It’s cool to see people offering shout-outs to the late pope in just about every language you can think of, and…

Pro-Gay Marriage Mormon Keeps Faith Despite Church Pressure

By Joanna Brooks

…er people marriage?” Her two-minute video made the website, then the local news in Salt Lake City, and within days an official at LDS Church headquarters placed a concerned phone call to Melanie S.’s local clergy. Three times her bishop met with Melanie to discuss the video. Because she had affiliated with “Mormons for Marriage,” he questioned whether or not Melanie and her husband should be allowed to keep their temple recommends—certificates tha…

Lila Rose, Defunding Planned Parenthood, and “Christian Worldview”

By Sarah Posner

…rings organization that teaches teenagers and young adults about the only true worldview, Christianity. I wrote about Summit last year: [David] Noebel, or “Doc” 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 t…

Will Huntsman’s Mormon Mojo Work on the National Stage?

By Joanna Brooks

…on. The media too has generated no shortage of breathless but virtually news-less profiles about candidate Huntsman. A refreshingly sober and penetrating take comes from the New York Times’ Matt Bai, who observes that Huntsman has already encountered trouble on the campaign trail connecting with voters, leaving them “disappointed” by his “lack of any evident vision.” The perception that Huntsman lacks a clear vision is not helped along by video…

Focus on the Family’s Conversation Starter a Non-Starter

By Sarah Posner

…ting point would put American woman back in the dark ages.” We’ve head the words “common ground” before; and while many of the proponents of “common ground” on abortion said they wanted to decrease the number of abortions by, among other things, providing access to contraception and family planning to reduce unintended pregnancies, there wasn’t common ground among the common grounders on that question. At the heart of that dispute, of course, are…

Kendrick Lamar’s Hip-Hop Jeremiad

By Josiah Daniels

…ump into your arms Cut on the engine, then sped off in the rain I’m gone. Truly, as Brueggemann tells it, “the vocation of a prophet is [a] conflicted way to live.” We get some sense of this conflictedness when, despite his and his communities’ inconsolable reality of loss, Jeremiah imagines a real political Messiah who will rescue his people from imperial totalism (Jer. 23:5-6). This is the Messiah who, as womanist theologian Jacquelyn Grant expr…