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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…

Even After an Obama Victory Reports of the Death of the Religious Right are Greatly Exaggerated

By Bill Berkowitz

…folk to meet with Obama administration officials and to work together on a number of policy issues including Obama’s plan for revitalized faith-based initiatives, global warming, combatting AIDS in Africa and poverty at home and abroad. “Look for the stock of religious conservative leaders such as Rick Warren, Stephen Mansfield, author of The Faith of Obama, and Cameron Strang, publisher of Relevant, a hipster Christian magazine that puffed Obama,…

RD News Round-Up—Nov. 4, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…venue in 2007. Americans United points out on its website that there are a number of other important religious right organizations to be aware of, including Gary Bauer’s American Values, Rick Scarborough’s Vision America, and Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition. An expanded version of the Church & State story is available here. ++++++++++ New Coalition takes on Christian Zionism Before the end of the year, the Los Angeles Times reported in…

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

…mption”); Redemption is the name of a heavy metal band, and the title of a number of record albums including one by the metal group Vomitory, and the hip hop duo GRITS; “Redemption” was the title of a two-part episode on television’s “Stargate SG-1,” and also of a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” two-parter. “Redemption Song” was one of many of Bob Marley’s extraordinary musical contributions, and if you haven’t seen The Shawshank Redemption, rent…

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

By Michelle Lelwica

…ew 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 chapter on aging, I nixed a rather lengthy critique I’d developed of Deepak…

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…

Raelians’ “Clitoraid” Met With Suspicion in Burkina Faso

By Joseph Laycock

…rci Bowers has worked with the program extensively. Clitoraid engaged in a number of fund raising projects, including an “Adopt a Clitoris” campaign and a number of partnerships with companies that make vibrators. This funding was used to recruit and fund a team of surgeons (who are not Raelians) and to establish a “pleasure hospital” in Burkina Faso. There is some controversy as to what percentage of women who undergo the surgery will be able to…