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Death in the Desert: Riding With the Samaritans

By Lauri Lebo

…anctuary of God.” The church gave shelter to thousands fleeing the Central American death squads. In 1986, Fife was one of eight activists convicted on alien-smuggling charges and served five years’ probation. His fellow defendant, Sister Darlene Nicgorski, argued for her First Amendment right to practice her religion, saying, “If I am guilty of anything, I am guilty of the gospel.” Today, Fife is pastor emeritus at the church. In 2002, he helped…

Springtime for Ross Douthat?

By Daniel Schultz

…ralist”— as though its message of redemption and liberation of the African-American community has nothing to do with it. And then there’s the bit about “religious liberalism’s urge to follow secular liberalism in embracing the sexual revolution and all its works.” Cute. I wonder if a Times columnist might not want to consider the use of statistics in his work, like this one: 99% of all American women who have had sex have used some form of birth c…

Doubt v. Predator: A Vatican II Parable

By Gabriel Mckee

…nation of secular and religious cultures. Set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964 (taken from Shanley’s own childhood experience), the school’s principal, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), is almost comically tyrannical. The parish priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is unconventional, almost hip, peppering his sermons with jokes and hugging students. The setting is ripe for tension, though it doesn’t explode until Sister James (Amy Adams)…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…w each of these former homosexuals lived their lives in clubs, engaging in cheap, easy, and often public sex, or were sexually abused. For all the claptrap the religious right yells about how they don’t want to think of us “that way,” the trailer for the film is positively voyeuristic! Let’s face it, gay sex is completely titillating to heterosexuals, especially conservative Christian heterosexuals. They can’t stop thinking about us in bed! Remind…

Why Taxing the Rich is the Godly Thing

By Peter Laarman

…t capital strike. The hardworking and hard-pressed folks sitting up in the cheap seats would cheer him on—and maybe even think about voting for him again, and voting for Democrats this fall. One little problem with this scenario: Obama has surrounded himself with once-and-future high-income individuals who are themselves highly susceptible to supply-side dogma that says the rich must be curtsied to and coddled if the nation is to prosper. We shoul…

Recovering From Rejection: The Second Coming of Ted Haggard

By Wendy Norris

…the Earth.” The cracker barrel-styled reading of Acts—and of I Corinthians 13 at the prayer meeting the week before where 150 people reportedly swarmed his house—are emblematic of Pastor Ted’s uncanny, Zelig-like talent for reflecting the emerging Christian Right zeitgeist of the moment. In the mid-1980s, the so-called Charismatic and Pentecostal “shift in gravity” from the Deep South westward had much less to do with a random vision to build a c…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…impromptu gathering among a handful of friends on a San Francisco beach in 1986 and was moved to an obscure corner of Nevada called the Black Rock Desert in 1990, where it eventually grew into an internationally renowned event that draws close to 50,000 participants annually. For one week in late August and early September, an elaborate civic infrastructure called “Black Rock City” is constructed, featuring a carefully laid out grid of streets i…

The Intellectual Source Code For National Conservatism Can Be Found at This Niche Catholic Publication

By Peter Schwartz

…unding the National Conservative movement is not without precedent. Between 1800 and 1950, Europe endured what amounted to a second Catholic Counter-Reformation. In the latter portion of the 19th century, predominantly Catholic countries in Europe—which of course European nations have largely been since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia—experienced an upsurge of royalist and irredentist passions to which the Catholic Church often attached itself (for e…

A Muslim Reflects on Christian Theologian (and UCLA Coach) John Wooden

By Amir Hussain

…mportantly for the life lessons. His beloved wife Nellie had passed away in 1985 after 53 years of marriage, and my wife had died suddenly in 1992. Coach gave me a powerful model for dealing with that loss, a reminder that those we loved were always in our lives. On the 21st of each month (Nellie had passed on March 21), Coach would write a letter to Nellie, adding it to the neat pile on her side of the bed. During my development as a teacher, I c…

Orthodox Rabbi Imitates Pat Robertson

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…iations. The group of Ultra-Orthodox Jews have apparently been around since 1945, and “seeks to promulgate the cause of Torah-true Judaism through an organized rabbinate that is consistently Orthodox.” Levin says he agrees “with Eileen Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness that this will hurt the cohesiveness of the military, cause many to leave the army, and dramatically lower the number of recruits, perhaps leading to the reinstatement o…