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Travolta Airlifts Scientology, Supplies, to Haiti

…pastoral care.” Their counseling services included promoting their hotline number on Fox News under the title “National Mental Health Assistance.” In 2002, Tom Cruise and executives from Scientology’s FASE (Foundation for the Advancement in Science and Education) launched “Downtown Medical” (also called “New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project”). This facility offered FDNY firefighters and other recovery workers the opportunity to partake i…

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UPDATED: Religion Has Been Framed; Covering the Aga Khan’s Visit

…Even with Pope Benedict’s visit to the United States last week, I was pleasantly surprised to see some fairly major coverage of the visit of another religious leader, the Aga Khan. He is the head of a Shi’ah community known as the Isma’ilis, who officially have 15-20 million members worldwide. CNN’s 360º Blog ran two pieces: one by Zarifmo Aslamshoyeva and one by Reza Aslan; OnFaith had a piece by Eboo Patel. There was no other national coverage…

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When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

…bson’s Barbarian Virtues are two of the most influential books for me, so I’d have loved to have written those! What’s your next book? I’m in the early stages of my next project, exploring how Holiness adherents understood and demonstrated their identity as sanctified individuals and as part of a sanctified community. For some of this, I will be looking at the connections they made here in the United States across regional lines as well as with th…

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More Than Big Hair and Money: Jim, Tammy Faye and the Media “Holy Wars” of the 80s

…some of Jim and Tammy’s appeal. PTL was all about images so there were any number of options. Too bad books can’t come with a dozen different covers to choose from. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? I love the writing style of Lawrence Wright and Hampton Sides. They are both masters at weaving nonfiction into a page-turner. Anything half as good would be fine with me. What’s your next book? I’m not sure yet. Hopef…

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Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

…cked theological rigor. More wholesome bands like Jars of Clay essentially sang praise anthems while an angstier West Coast nouveau evangelical ethos emerged in bands like P.O.D. On the other side of this spectrum were bands that positioned themselves as anti-Christian, though even their blasphemies came up short. Marilyn Manson scared the daylights out of children and parents alike in his 1990s heyday, but his most controversial album, Antichrist…

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Change v. Change at NPR

…ebate but it is between the mental health establishment and a much smaller number of traditionally minded religious therapists. However, even if Spiegel had correctly identified the nature and participants in the debate, she still would not have gotten it quite right. To his credit, Schumacher-Matos does a better job when he reviews material given to him by Spiegel and her editor Anne Gudenkauf. Among other things, Schumacher-Matos read an article…

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American Christianity Is Changing Fast: Five Stories to Watch in 2016

…ken a much more adversarial stance to LGBT acceptance. However, increasing numbers of evangelical churches are accepting LGBT individuals as members. This development is not without its opponents, however. Many evangelical organizations—most significantly colleges, universities and seminaries—are mobilizing to retain their “religious right” to discriminate against LGBT individuals. More than 30 evangelical higher education institutions have petiti…

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Haiti and the Push for Theological Questions

…nine on the Richter scale. It devastated the population. Estimates of the number of people killed range from 10,000 to 100,000. At the time the quake struck, worshipers filled the churches honoring their dead. The churches, the worshippers, and the city around them were effectively destroyed. Not long after the major quake hit, a tsunami followed that killed those who had rushed to the beaches in fear to avoid the havoc of the earthquake. The cat…

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Life Imitates Satire Imitates Life: Rep. King Revives Manchurian Candidate

…ndly American Muslim leader, Shaykh Hisham Kabbani. In honor of this magic number and the hearings King will hold next month in order to address the “creeping threat of Sharia law,” RD presents the first edition of Life Imitates Satire Imitates Life.   In this clip, from the Manchurian Candidate a Joseph McCarthy stand-in uses his own investigative tool to determine how many crypto-commies there really are… Rep. Peter King (R-NY), minus 45 years f…

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Ideology is More Than Skin Deep: Why I Can’t Get Along To Go Along

…hristians, but only half or so of those are regular practitioners, and the numbers continue to decline. Meanwhile, the nation as a whole has seen a significant shift to the left by party affiliation if not by ideological descriptor. Only a determined minority of social conservatives continues to move to the right. It’s easy to get lost in the fog of math, but the underlying point here should be clear: not everyone is a Christian, and nowhere near…

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