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Suicide Bombers and the Prozac God: A Review of Dying for Heaven

By Bruce B. Lawrence

Dying for Heaven: Holy Pleasure and Suicide Bombers–Why the Best Qualities of Religion Are Also its Most Dangerous by Ariel Glucklich (HarperOne, November 3, 2009) Writing about suicide bombers is a crowded field, especially since 9/11. Two years ago, Martha Crenshaw, a prominent professor of government at Wesleyan University, wrote a mega-review of the top twelve books on this riveting but complex topic. She concluded her nearly 30-page essay by…

GOP Candidate: Obama is Taking Your Freedom to Find the Lord

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…rsonal choice between you and the god or gods you don’t believe in. What’s best about America, though, is that each person, religious or not, has the right to be treated with both equality and equity by their government (though they may have to fight for that right to be recognized). I find it odd, though, that those who make the best arguments for the separation of church and state are most often those trying to marry the two until death do us al…

The Rise and Fall of an American Gang: Religion as Camouflage?

By Spencer Dew

…ons as with this whopper: “Meanwhile, the anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiments that Farrakhan unleashed in the United States were being echoed in parts of the Islamic global community,” which is followed by a brief discussion of Osama bin Laden, as if he were the only example of anti-Jewish sentiment in the Islamic ummah and as if, more disturbingly, he were “echoing” anything at all from Farrakhan. The authors, however, want to argue that do…

Is Monsanto Satan? The Pleasure and Problem of Conspiracy Theory

By Alan Levinovitz

…atan, the better—the only—explanation is that Nye was coerced, just as the best explanation for my skepticism about the dangers of grains or MSG is that the industry has paid me. Shiva’s logic, the logic of believing in Satan, is really just the logic of conspiracy: simple, irrefutable, and empowering. Scholar of apocalypticism Michael Barkun puts it well: [The conspiracy theorist’s view] is frightening because it magnifies the power of evil, lead…

Pope Francis v. Kim Davis: A Vatican Game of Thrones

By Anthea Butler

…ed a rebuttal to the Vatican’s statement on the meeting, which is naïve at best. Staver lying at the Values Voters Summit about 100,000 people in Peru praying for Kim Davis proves that he’s willing to stretch a story to fit the narrative of Kim Davis as a Martyr and “conscientious objector.” No matter how much he may continue to assert that “Vatican officials approved the visit,” I would suspect the only Vatican official he most likely spoke with…

Blank Sabbath: Sens. Sponsor Bill to Curb Wage Theft

By Peter Laarman

…ly ignore the exploitation of working people while lionizing our cheating, cheapskate “entrepreneurs” as social heroes has to do with the subservience of the whole American culture—including America’s faith communities—to a Pharoanic model of social organization. Theologian Walter Brueggemann is at his best in describing Pharoah’s Egypt—and contemporary America—as a disordered place of unlimited exploitation and exhaustion. In this context the gre…

The Most Forgotten Queer Folks in the US are Fighting Back Against a Powerful — and Publicly Funded — Group That Discriminates With Impunity

By Chrissy Stroop

…nized student groups. The administrations rejected their applications, sometimes proffering unacceptable alternatives, such as non-affirming, administration-controlled groups. Over time, sympathetic outside organizations and alumni began offering direct support to these unofficial queer student groups, providing consulting and information resources to help their leaders strategize about the most effective ways to advocate for their rights and dign…

Did Mormon Morality Teachings Really Make it Harder for Elizabeth Smart to Run?

By Joanna Brooks

…ing responsible sexuality to young people will fall back on what they know best—in the worst cases resorting to spent chewing gum, or ruined donuts, or other punitive object lessons. Punitive and sexist folk doctrine does not in fact reflect the best of Mormon scripture or theology, which takes a positive view of human embodiment including the “fall” of Adam and Eve. And yet punitive rhetoric on sexual morality can be found in the historic writing…

Peter Beinart’s Controversial The Crisis of Zionism: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Treatment

By Shaul Magid

…It’s not like it’s the only book on this subject written from the left. A number of far more “radical” than books than The Crisis of Zionism have been ignored by comparison: Gershom Gorenberg’s The Accidental Empire (2007), Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (2009), Oren Yiftaehel’s Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (2006), Baruch Kimmerling’s The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the…

#OccupyWallStreet and the Antichrist

By Sarah Posner

…millions of voters, like their Depression-era predecessors, fear that the time is short. The sentiment that Mr. Obama is preparing the United States, as Roosevelt did, for the Antichrist’s global coalition is likely to grow. Let’s unpack that. I’ll start with the second item first, because it pops a balloon of conventional wisdom that animated Obama’s religious outreach during his 2008 campaign, and throughout his first term, through his Office o…