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Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

…o visit the author’s church, Wasilla Bible Church. I remember pulling the book surreptitiously out of my satchel and opening the cover with some mixture of dread and resignation, figuring that I might someday be able to make a case that the hours spent reading the book should count as a credit toward Purgatory. The autobiography was, as I suspected, pretty insubstantial, filled with morality-play vignettes from childhood and recitations of the aut…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…of how America was derided in the 19th and early 20th centuries. (There’s good and bad there, as any new capitalist conglomeration would feature.) Dubai is the biggest city in the UAE, with 2.1 million people. Recently I heard that some 13,000 people move to the city each month, which can be best described as clumps of skyscrapers along massive highways, some 6-8 lanes in each direction. But though it’s called the United Arab Emirates, the popul…

“Godly Or Bad?”: The Return of Ted Haggard

By J. Terry Todd

…territory. Scandal! Hypocrisy! This past Sunday, the Rev. Brady Boyd, who took over from Haggard as senior pastor of New Life Church in the wake of the first revelations back in 2006, stood in front of his congregation, visibly anxious, to announce that “the wound has been re-opened.” Boyd said he had hoped the church “wouldn’t have to revisit the unpleasant parts of our past,” but at New Life as elsewhere, a buried past has a way of springing up…

The Birth of Un-Cool: How Disgusted Liberals Became Neoconservatives

By Michelle Goldberg

…d to destroy them and all they valued. But Wolfe captured something else, too—the moment when fashion shifted, and the lefty mascots once glorified for their salt-of-the-earth authenticity suddenly appeared gauche and irrational and actually pretty threatening. He captured, in other words, the birth of the neoconservative spirit. Something similar seems to be happening today among urbane, bourgeois, conservative intellectuals. For years, they’ve l…

NPR “Ex-Gay” Report Neither “Fair” Nor “Balanced”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…report about “reparative therapy” for gay and lesbian people. The report took someone who claims to be “cured” of his homosexuality, Rich Wyler, and juxtaposed his story with that of Peterson Toscano, a man who went through “reparative therapy” and says he was deeply harmed psychologically by the experience. While the NPR piece does have moments of clarity, to call it balanced is a bit of a stretch. First, the reporter never tells us exactly who…

Romney to Talk Mormonism Tonight: Risky?

By Sarah Posner

…Back from my Bloggingheads hiatus, I talk with Get Religion’s Mollie Hemingway about whether Mitt Romney’s plan to discuss his Mormonism tonight at the Republican National Convention benefit his candidacy: And we also discussed the significance of the fact that Barack Obama is the only Protestant on both presidential tickets: …

Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…valent of 30 pieces of silver. There is no place to park. I circle blocks looking for a space and in so doing pass the protesters pacing the sidewalks in front of the Embassy Suites. My heart sinks. Des Moines is a relatively small city with a gold-domed capitol overshadowing buildings of varying sizes and architectural styles—it looks like a child upended his collection of blocks and called it a city. A nice farmers’ market on Saturday mornings i…

Necessary Sacrifice: Sundance, Mormon Movies, and the Race to Oscar Night

By Kathryn Lofton

…as a “lackluster” Sundance produced not one breakout film. A Utah sojourn took me to one of the Sundance shorts screenings, a subset of the Sundance array that also includes independent film (documentary and dramatic) and world cinema (documentary and dramatic). “Shorts have the ability to transcend traditional storytelling,” explains Sundance propaganda, “Fueled by artistic expression, they are free from the boundaries imposed on feature-length f…

Everything You Think You Know About the Dark Ages is Wrong

By Nancy Marie Brown

…oduced to The Scientist Pope through an act of grace. Writing my previous book, The Far Traveler, about an adventurous Viking woman, I found myself making an imaginary pilgrimage to Rome just after the year 1000. Wondering which pope (if any) Gudrid the Far-Traveler had met, I discovered Gerbert of Aurillac, Pope Sylvester II. I was astonished. Nothing in my many years of reading about the Middle Ages had led me to suspect that the pope in the ye…

The Question of Evil: Politicians Weigh In

By Mark Gstohl

…n the claim that we were trying to confront evil. [WARREN: In the name of good.] In the name of good, and I think, you know, one thing that’s very important is having some humility in recognizing that just because we think that our intentions are good, doesn’t always mean that we’re going to be doing good. Now here’s John McCain’s response to Warren’s question: MCCAIN: Defeat it. A couple of points. One, if I’m president of the United States, my f…