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Rick Perry’s Jesus Imperative: A Report from Saturday’s Mega-Rally

By Sarah Posner

…lted. The people who gathered at Reliant Stadium are not just Rick Perry’s spiritual army, raised up, as Perry and others imagine it, in the spirit of Joel 2 to sound an alarm and prepare the people for Judgment Day. They are the ground troops the religious right set out four decades ago to create, and duplicate over generations, for the ongoing culture wars. One part of that army is people like Perry himself, supported by religious right politica…

America Does Not Have a Religious Identity

By Dennis J Goldford

…he Constitution of Religious Freedom, with the deliberate double meaning of 1) the Constitution as a charter of religious freedom, and 2) the act of constituting religious freedom, and Baylor came up with the clever subtitle, God, Politics, and the First Amendment. I was able to give my concluding chapter the title, “One Nation under Whose God?” How do you feel about the cover? I’m actually quite happy with it. Beyond being aesthetically attractiv…

Watching Preachers’ Daughters Right After the Boston Bombings While Teaching a Class on Augustine’s Confessions

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…taxonomies—good bodies and bad bodies, dirty acts and pure acts, flesh and spirit, those in authority and those under authority. I think that tendency has hurt people, and I think it’s implicated in rape culture. And that matters: this is not an interesting little theological problem for specialists to rub their chins over and try to work out in the abstract. But. You know what? I just can’t, right now, mock the parents on Preachers’ Daughters fo…

Honey Boo Boo and the Sweet By and By

By Carrie Allen Tipton

…rasp the paradox of how this music can exert such a powerful aesthetic and spiritual hold over him (and by extension, over others) when its host culture opposes his ethical values on so many fronts. Writing himself visibly and self-consciously into the study allows for an empathetic, nuanced, yet honest rhetorical stance reminiscent of Randall Balmer’s tone in Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. To mix religious metaphors, Harrison kicks a couple of sa…

Why Are Muslims So Concerned with Muhammad?

By Haroon Moghul

…ions, with some differences between Muslim sects.) Muslim men grow facial hair because Muhammad did. They dress in certain ways, eat in certain ways, and behave in certain ways, based on how Muhammad did. This isn’t to say there isn’t tremendous disagreement over these behaviors, and many Muslims struggle over whether to emphasize the spirit and the form of the action, as many others do—indeed, we have the same debate over the American Constitutio…

Why I Am a “Cuomosexual”

By Donna Schaper

…gical statement matters more to the deportee, the down-and-out, and the gay 17-year-old who jumps off a bridge than any horse-trading we could ever do. We still want to be smart about the material while being enchanted by the spiritual. We are not going back to the time when we converted people in the soup kitchen so they could eat (are you saved?) so much as we are going forward toward an opening levered by the Holy Spirit and drawing us more dee…

The Gospel Gestalt: From Joyful Noise to Whitney Houston

By Douglas Harrison

…l a gospel sensibility. I’ve written in these pages before about gospel as spiritual lingua franca in American culture. This notion is widely dispersed throughout the popular imagination and rests on a belief in gospel music as a universal language of deep spiritual feeling that, paradoxically, derives from and transcends racial history in America (incidentally, I recommend Gerardo Marti’s most recent book, Worship Across the Racial Divide, if you…

First Gay Bishop? Give Me a Break

By Peter Montgomery

…wd favorite at the DC screening I attended was Bishop Barbara Harris, whose 1989 consecration as the first female bishop in the Anglican Communion also shook up the church. Harris is memorably direct. About the idea that Robinson is the first gay bishop, Harris snorts, “Give me a break.” In response to some of the rhetoric at the bishops’ gathering, she says, “if assholes could fly, this place would be an airport.” First Amendment Protection Must…

Were Angels Just Lucid Dreams?

By Richard Schiffman

…to another realm of experience—a realm of heightened awareness and intense spiritual aliveness which challenges our very notions of what is real and what it means to be “awake.” The music we hear during lucid dreams is rapturous and drenched in feeling; the colors are more subtle and vibrant than the ones we see in the “real world”; the aromas and tastes are more real than real; the sex is explosive and ecstatic; and the insights are profound, if…

An Atheist Hero is Something to Be

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…d prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief—confirmed in the holy scriptures—that we are all equal in the eyes of God. You admire him for that taking that stand. He’s seen the damage religion does to women in all parts of the world. When you were seven years old, you wanted to become a missionary—there’s supposed to be something authentic in those early childhood aspiratio…