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“Secrets of the Vatican” Brought Down Benedict

By Patricia Miller

…nd that Pope Benedict’s butler took the fall for senior clerics looking to air the Vatican’s dirty laundry after repeated efforts at reform were foiled. Francis took a concrete step in the direction of reform Monday with the creation of a new office to oversee economic affairs at the Vatican, including the troubled Vatican Bank. But as Mary Hunt and others have noted, it’s unraveling the tangled knot of the hierarchy’s attitudes toward women and s…

Goliath the Israel Slayer: Why Max Blumenthal’s New Book is a Painful Read

By Shaul Magid

…aders outside of Israel know of the plight of Yonatan Shapira, the Israeli air force pilot who became an active peace advocate and critic of the IDF who’s suffered miserably with imprisonment and interrogations? How many know of the physical and verbal abuse of Israeli Arab Knesset member Hanin Zoabi such that security guards had to be provided for her when she entered the Knesset to protect her from the abuse of her fellow parliamentarians? She w…

Latest Shroud of Turin Theory: Nuclear Emissions

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…ribed “Shroudies,” have been raising objections: a medieval fire or modern air pollution altered the amount of carbon in the cloth; researchers actually tested cloth pieces that had been added centuries later in an attempt to repair the original. Carpinteri’s claim is hardly novel, but it is unusually transparent. His idea relies on a theory called “piezonuclear fission,” but that theory is so scientifically controversial that a group of 1,000 sci…

Hannibal Returns: Is TV’s Favorite Serial Killer the Devil Himself?

By Nicholas Laccetti

…tations on the Scriptures. Retreatants are instructed to feel the Galilean air, the dirt under their feet, as they witness Jesus’ miracles, his suffering. Here, instead, Will immerses himself in crime scenes, with the imaginative faculties and empathy that would certainly serve him well as a Christian mystic. In fact, if Will Graham were diagnosed by a medieval theologian like St. Thomas Aquinas rather than a cannibalistic psychiatrist, he’d be co…

Harold Camping, Prophet of Apocalypse, Dies at 92

By Daniel Silliman

…ed between a burger joint and an auto parts store on a road to the Oakland airport, the network has built a broad and powerful reach. Its signal is broadcast or relayed on more than 150 stations and translators in the United States. It airs in several major metropolitan areas, on the Internet and in Europe, Africa and Asia. It reaches mainland China from a station in Taiwan and is building a station to reach much of Southeast Asia. It also has exp…

Paul Crouch, Architect of Prosperity Gospel Televangelism, Dead at 79

By Sarah Posner

…d, about how he was forced to have sex with Crouch to keep his job. On the air, Crouch called the story a “pack of lies right out of the pit of hell.” Other prosperity televangelists closed ranks around Crouch; the enemy, after all, was the secular media. More recently, in 2012, Brittany Koper, the Crouches’ granddaughter and daughter of their son Paul, Jr., sued the network. She described to the New York Times “company-paid luxuries that she sai…

“Flipping the Script” to Win Gays Back to the Evangelical Church

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…aham Maslow has postulated that all humans need things like food, shelter, air, sleep and a sense of security. Right there among those top needs are the social needs of relationship. When we have companionship we have someone to share our lives with, to share our thoughts and feelings, to share our dreams with and move toward those dreams together. This is the kind of companionship I find in the relationship I have with my spouse. We fulfill those…

Soy Story: Atrocious ‘Reporting’ on Insular Religious Groups

By Eli Federman and James Moxness

…accurate information shouldn’t suffer. While cable news outlets sometimes air nonsensical speculation or rumor-as-news, as was the case with the Boston Bombing, there’s a glaring failure of journalistic integrity when it comes to reporting on obscure religious groups. It’s tempting to believe that insular religious societies are treated by some as a “free pass” from engaging in good journalism. And the line between news, documentary, docudrama,…

Why It’s Okay to Criticize Fundamentalist Evangelicals

By Tom Eggebeen

…enical Protestantism and its success and achievements is a breath of fresh air. In a recent interview in Christian Century, Hollinger, former president of the Organization of American Historians, and professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, calmly and firmly lifts up the legacy of Ecumenical Protestantism (EcuP): our recognition that marriage is more than procreation, our challenge to Billy Graham’s reduction of sin to somet…

New Book: God Favors Supply-Side Economics

By Gordon Haber

…r in America usually have air conditioning, a car, a television, and a telephone.” These (alleged) facts must be a great comfort to the Americans struggling with joblessness and poverty. There is some decent advice about budgeting in Godonomics, but it’s undermined by all the howlers. Hovind believes, for example, that the Federal Reserve is a “privately owned bank,” that the term “social justice” has been hijacked by secret “Marxists” like Jim Wa…