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A Palin Pastor Primer

By Esther Kaplan

…now been widely discussed: In 1996 Palin approached the Wasilla librarian about whether she’d be willing to censor some books, should citizens have concerns about inappropriate language; a few months after the librarian refused to consider such a thing, Palin sought to fire her (though local protest saved the woman’s job). The second incident has only been picked up, so far, in the local press: Last winter, when the state rep from Wasilla was con…

Left, Behind on Obama’s Warren Strategy

By Nick Street

…and religious left to be eating its own. For the record, I agree with just about everything Ostertag has said on these matters, both in his earlier, carefully outlined analysis and in the more spontaneous follow-up. At the risk of calling down lefty wrath on my head, I thought I’d offer my own (queer) angle on gay marriage and Obama’s pre-inaugural maneuvering: The world is a mess. Violence in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia thre…

Shhh…Don’t Speak of Abortion: Roe v. Wade at Thirty-Six

By Frederick Clarkson

…a story about a Catholic nun who once told her that while she didn’t know about the morality of abortion, if we were to have the right, then everyone should have access. The moral of Rev. Fowler’s story cuts to the core of the politics of abortion in America. Though nominally a right under Roe vs. Wade, decided thirty-six years ago today, the reality is that there are many obstacles—some insurmountable—to both receiving and providing abortion car…

RD10Q: Living Without God

By Ronald Aronson

…nonbelievers are a very small (5%) minority.” The polls are wrong: In fact about one-quarter of Americans are secularists. I explain that in the October 20 USA Today, and in the introduction to the book. C) “To not believe in God means that you think you’re smarter than believers and/or you hate religion.” In fact, believers and nonbelievers will both be around for a long time for come, and we need to work out ways of living together in mutual res…

What in the Name of the Crusades are Tennessee Evangelicals Doing in Kurdish Iraq?

By Bill Berkowitz

…r government and law, the arts and sports, education, business, economics, science and technology, the media, and the family.” Otis, one of the generals in the Spiritual Warfare movement, heads The Sentinel Group, formerly known as Issachar Frontier Missions Strategies. Sentinel is essentially a global evangelical intelligence agency that deploys “field cells” with laptops who gather demographics in cities and rural areas in targeted countries. Th…

Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World

By Bruce Wilson

…issionary conferences, US visitors were flown in to teach the missionaries about ‘a new cutting-edge paradigm’ for mission… The new paradigm entailed that missionaries had to ‘identify’ and ‘bind territorial spirits’ and ‘unleash’ divine power. Evangelism was to be preceded by ‘prayer walks,’ and prayer was considered best if done geographically ‘on-site,’ within a ‘target area.’ Prayer became the identification of and confrontation with demons… A…

All You Had to Do Was Express Regret: Pope Benedict XVI’s Rocky Visit to Yad Vashem

By Adam Gregerman

…hat is, the roots of what became Nazi anti-Semitism lie in Christian ideas about the Jews’ malevolence—their guilt for the crucifixion, rejection by God, and adherence to a debased faith—which already appear in the New Testament, and were developed in an extensive Adversus Judaeos tradition. Through repetition and reinterpretation, the argument goes, these prepared many modern Europeans for a genocide that was neither religious nor inevitable. How…

Niebuhrian Humility and DC Punditry

By Daniel Schultz

…asn’t possible to solve our way out of the world’s problems through better science or more scientific government. That’s the neo-orthodox piece of his argument, over and against the Christian liberalism that led us into World War I. But humility for Niebuhr was always a moral claim, not so much an assertion about our critical or perceptual faculties. At the center of his argument is a specific critique of ideology. Niebuhrian humility springs from…

Imagine No Religion: Sustaining Morality Without God

By Konstantin Petrenko

…an development and economic equality just don’t seem to need God. But what about the godless Communist regimes? Don’t they prove the danger of rejecting the religious foundation for ethics? There is no question that the Soviet leaders, for instance, committed unspeakable atrocities; many of them in the name of atheism. The difference between successful secular nations and the Communist states, however, lies not in their rejection of religion, but…

Republican Gomorrah Documents the Christian Right Takeover of the GOP

By Chip Berlet

…dualistic apocalypticism “leaves no room for ambiguity in the stories told about the ‘Other.’ There is a real hardening of sides. We are good, they are evil. This is not a disagreement, but a struggle with evil incarnate, so there is no structure for a peaceful reconciliation.” The stories surfacing in the angry teabagger, townhaller, and birther movements reflect this aggressive apocalyptic dualism in both religious and secular forms. Republican…