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Like Azusa Street Baptized into Bureaucracy: Mexico’s Flourishing LLDM Church Loses its Apostle

By Michael Schulson

…ong). But I’m getting carried away. Luz del Mundo persists because, for thousands of people, it has an appeal. And to understand why, exactly, it helps to pay a visit to the Church’s Mexican Jerusalem, tucked into the eastern sprawl of Guadalajara. We have our own power There is no clear border to Hermosa Provincia. The colorful walls of Guadalajara’s citrus-lined streets just grade into whitewashed buildings, their window sashes and doors painted…

I Was Nearly Seduced by David Brooks’ Reasonable Analysis

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…inant models of analysis: number crunching and psychology. Greenspan was a number cruncher, says Brooks, and unfortunately, human psychology caught up with him. Greenspan saw real estate values continuing to soar with no end in sight and allowed himself to be persuaded that they would never stop rising, and certainly would never fall. So he never had to think about petty psychological realities, like a crisis of confidence, never mind an actual pa…

Ten of Our Favorite Top Tens

By The Editors

…ists. From the Ten Commandments, to the ten avatars of Vishnu (Krishna was number eight), to Buddhism’s ten precepts, religions are all about systems, ethical prescriptions—or proscriptions—and grand schemes. Order out of chaos is the name of the game. All this to suggest that the Top Ten list is obviously something deeply ingrained in the human experience. So here, without further preamble, RD’s picks for the Ten Best of 2008’s Religion Top Ten l…

Women’s Liberation Through Submission: An Evangelical Anti-Feminism Is Born

By Kathryn Joyce

…ambitions: I began to wonder what might happen in our day if even a small number of devoted, intentional women would begin to pray and believe God for a revolution of a different kind—a counterrevolution—within the evangelical world… Unlike most revolutions, this counterrevolution does not require that we march in the streets or send letters to Congress or join yet another organization. It does not require us to leave our homes; in fact, for many…

Amway, Religious Right Pyramid Scheme, Returns to the Motherland

By Bill Berkowitz

…site, is the “largest prison ministry in the world,” and “partners with thousands of churches and tens of thousands of volunteers.” One conservative reader irked by the column’s questioning of Colson’s fitness for a PCM, wrote: “Oh, please. Hope you never need redemption.” How are we to understand the concept of redemption? Of the five definitions in the American Heritage Dictionary, three are economically related: the paying of an obligation (gov…

The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

By Michelle Lelwica

…here anything you had to leave out? My publisher allowed me to go a few thousand words over their original word limit, but I still had to cut a number of compelling stories of people who have struggled with body shame because of internalized cultural/religious norms and narratives about weight, disability, chronic pain or illness. I also had to omit some of my analyses of examples of the culture of physical improvement. For instance, in the chapte…

What Irish Marriage Vote Means for Catholic Church; The Lonely Fight for Equality in Belize; Progress and Backlash in Tunisia; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ounded a nationwide activist campaign, Belize Action, and began drawing thousands of believers to rallies that denounced the “homosexual agenda.” Orozco is criticized for receiving support from international human rights groups; he is portrayed as the “traitorous pawns” of “meddling colonizers.” But American Religious Right groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute have been supporting Beli…

Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

By Peter Laarman

…ry of brutal union suppression by employers who figured out that it’s much cheaper to take the penalties currently handed out for labor law violations (which are extremely weak and rarely delivered) than to allow workers to unionize without interference in free and fair representation elections. By the Numbers The cold, hard facts are these: Polls consistently report that 60 million Americans would join a union tomorrow if they could, which clearl…

The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

By Paul Gorrell

…le from its ranks and fights against their rights, ignores the diminishing number of priests and the effects of this shortage on Church communities, and calls on Catholics to form the “perfect society” resembling the ecclesiology of Opus Dei. It is no surprise that Pope Benedict comes from a country—Germany—where the percentage of Church members attending Sunday mass is one of the lowest in the world. Strict adherence to orthodoxy will not be popu…

No Conspiracy Theories Needed: Abortion Foes Cry Racism

By Kathryn Joyce

…nual March for Life, Alveda King led a group of demonstrators in laying thousands of roses on the White House lawn to symbolize African-American abortions as part of her “Birmingham Letter Project.” The BLP Web site features a dyptic photograph of a hip, white pro-life man wearing red “Life” duct tape over his mouth next to three black civil rights marchers being hosed into the side of a building by segregationist police. (The injection of righteo…