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Religion in Tension on World AIDS Day

By Susan Henking

…lical Christian Rick Warren, that “Corinthians says that we are all of one spirit, and that ‘if one part suffers, every part suffers with it.’ But it also says, ‘if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.’ On this World AIDS day, it is the stories of overcoming, and not just illness, that the world needs to hear.” World AIDS Day is rife with interreligious services; and religious organizations are active internationally in both preventio…

God Grows Up: Robert Wright’s Evolution of God

By Robert Wright

…n on the Web. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? 1) That religion, at the time of its origin back in hunter-gatherer days, had anything to do with morality. Divine sanctions against stealing, lying, etc., aren’t much needed in a hunter-gatherer village, because it’s harder to get away with these things in the first place when you live with a very small number of people. 2) That ancient Israel was monotheistic from the ge…

World AIDS Day: Sacralizing Change

By Susan Henking

…elical Christian Rick Warren that “Corinthians says that we are all of one spirit, and that “if one part suffers, every part suffers with it.” But it also says, “if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” On this World AIDS day, it is the stories of overcoming, and not just illness, that the world needs to hear.” World AIDS Day is rife with interreligious services; and religious organizations are active internationally in both preventio…

Heroes: Sex and the Single Superhero

By Nick Street

…tweak our modern-day discomfort with difference. “You’re different too?” Claire asks Matt Parkman when she realizes that the former LAPD officer is reading her thoughts. Every Day is a Struggle In “Company Man,” an episode that aired during the first season of Heroes, Parkman and Ted Sprague, a human nuclear reactor who’s unstable in more ways than one, have invaded the Bennet home to get information from Claire’s father, Noah, a secret operative…

Dreaming Cyborg Dreams: Virtual Identity and Religious Experience

By Rachel Wagner

…tions of the real crucifixion—especially the Gnostic forms that imply the “spirit” of wisdom left Jesus as he hung limply on the cross. In this view, the body of Jesus was a mere virtual or illusory avatar—one that had once hosted an entity that in fact cannot experience pain and certainly cannot die “in-world.” This case suggests, albeit indirectly, that the ability to immerse deeply in an avatar depends on the extent that one’s religious worldvi…

A Dismayed Democrat Reads the Bible

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…f Paul, like 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians, and near the end of chapter 15 [in 1 Corinthians] he speaks as if this might happen while he is still alive. One big difference is he thought it was very, very soon from his point in time. Also, there is no reference to what Christians in our time refer to as ‘The Rapture,’ the notion that seven years before the second coming of Jesus, true-believing Christians will be taken up into heaven to be spar…

This is not a Religion Column: Sarah Palin, American

By Jeff Sharlet

…on and her small town roots is the way they seem to merge, the territorial spiritual warfare of her churches phrased in secular terms through her channeling of Pegler. “Territorial spiritual warfare” is the idea, embraced by Palin’s pastors, that entire cities can be possessed by demons. Small towns, too, theoretically, but that’s not usually how it works. The first time I encountered it was at Ted Haggard’s New Life Church, in Colorado Springs. W…

A Palin Pastor Primer

By Esther Kaplan

…rusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment—you can’t miss it.” Wasilla Bible Church is now promoting a September 13 Focus on the Family event called Love Won Out, a workshop on how to cure homosexuality through prayer [see pdf]. From 2006 on: Juneau Christian Center, Pastor Mike Rose Once Palin was elected governor, she affiliated with a third church, where she attends services while in t…

Gandhi, his Grandson, Israel, and the Jews

By Shalom Goldman

…e by peaceful means, not by violence. Gandhi’s opposition to Zionism in the 1920s and ’30s did not preclude support for the rights of Jews in Europe, however. In 1931, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, one of America’s most prominent Reform Rabbis and a leader of the Zionist Organization of America, was invited to address the Friends of Gandhi Dinner in New York City on the occasion of the Mahatma’s Sixty-second birthday. Rabbi Wise, who had long admired Gan…

A Lone Blogger vs. the McCain-Hagee Alliance

By Bruce Wilson

…ximates the vote-getting heft of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority of the late 1970s and 1980s and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition of the late 1980s and 1990s)—except that CUFI is based around one closely-related raft of goals which, as journalist Max Blumenthal has crisply put it, called for “an expansion of Israel and a unilateral military attack on Iran.” The video, which was more of a collage than a documentary, featured no narrative voice at…