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What if Israel Were in Germany? An Alternate History

By Haroon Moghul

…ey face a common enemy. Alternate histories are usually insightful for any number of reasons (and fun for those reasons, too), but why the author chooses to write them can be equally illuminating. What pushed you to write this, and when did you start on it? Like a lot of novelists, I started thinking about writing a 9/11 story pretty much from the moment the towers fell. I wanted to write something distinctive, though, not just a minor variation o…

Evangelicals Struggle With the Role of Churches in Society

By Omri Elisha

…rns for the welfare of society, many conservative evangelicals harbor deep reservations about supporting any programs that seem to deprioritize evangelism or run the risk of becoming too liberal or too secular. Socially engaged evangelicals counteract those concerns by insisting that faith-based activism can ideally be a vehicle for greater evangelism, not a distraction from it. But they often face strong ideological resistance and logistical cons…

What The Church Needs More Than a ‘Good Pope’

By Mary E. Hunt

…e this interview is a beginning not an end of a new moment. These serious reservations notwithstanding, my early read of “A Big Heart Open to God” is hopeful—to be otherwise would not be Catholic. Moral theologian Daniel C. Maguire gets it right when he says here on RD, “Never before has so much fresh air flowed through musty Vatican halls.” Let the dialogue get bigger and the table grow more crowded. Like this story? Your tax-deductible $5 or $…

Presbyterians, Change Hearts & Minds, Begin Ordaining Gays

By MaryAnn McKibben Dana

…ness in and for a denomination that has lost its way.” Regardless of those reservations, 10A is now the law of Presbyterian land. What lessons can be drawn from this success? Learning from Failure Amendment 10A is the culmination of years of tweaking and learning from past failures. After a 1997 attempt to replace “fidelity” and “chastity” with language about living with “integrity,” advocates spent a few years pursuing a strategy of deleting t…

Insurance Coverage for Abortion in Health Care Reform Threatened

By Carlton Veazey

…g children. This a largely pro-choice country at heart—even those who have reservations about abortion are firmly and consistently in favor of options that include family planning, contraception, and sexuality education, and in favor of women making decisions with dignity and minimal governmental interference. Insurance coverage for pregnancy termination has had a low profile until now because it was not threatened. Now that it is, it’s critical t…

Web 8.0: The Return of the Human

By Beatrice Marovich

…ees us as a unique species—not like any other animal. He has, for example, reservations about animal rights. Too much empathy for other creatures, he alleges, can lead to “empathy inflation.” If we want to protect the rights of non-humans, we might as well torture ourselves over whether or not we have the right to kill the harmful bacteria that’s crawling around on (and in) us. The borders of the human might be “variegated and fuzzy,” Lanier says,…

Pawlenty Stars in American Civil Religion: The Movie

By Michael J. Altman

…ression, blood, and violence beneath the freedom it proclaims. Pawlenty gives us Martin Luther King Jr. but not the church bombings, police dogs, and fire hoses. He gives us a quaint picture of horses and wagons but no images of American Indian removal, Indian wars, and shrinking reservations. He gives us the fall of the Berlin Wall but not McCarthyism. It’s an ad for a book (a book that isn’t selling that well, apparently) and not a history less…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

Pastor Convicted in Lisa Miller Child Kidnapping Case

By Peter Montgomery

…as he drove home from the border, Mr. Zodhiates tried to call a cellphone number registered to Liberty Counsel, an evangelical legal group. That cellphone number has sometimes been used by Mathew D. Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel, dean of the Liberty University Law School in Lynchburg, Va., and a leader of Ms. Miller’s defense team. The RICO filed by Jenkins includes information that RD readers learned last year from Sarah Posner’s expose…

Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

By Cathleen Falsani

…e priorities of old-fashioned evangelism—where a premium was placed on the number of souls that were “saved”—have been supplanted in recent years by those of the social gospel, in which Christian ethics are applied to societal issues such as poverty, violence, preventable disease, ecological concerns, gender issues, and human rights. “More and more you are beginning to see people seeing the social aspect of the Gospel, where Jesus himself went out…