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The Prophet Amos on Unemployment and Our Leadership

By Peter Laarman

…dering the fate of energy legislation and a sweeping financial regulatory bill.” So who do you suppose is buying high-priced tickets to these events? Well, you could get an idea about that from a profile in today’s Times on the rise and rise of corporate fixer Tony Podesta (“The Proud Lobbyist” reads the Times headline). Tony boasts that he lobbied on 25 different issues related to Wall Street regulation for major players like Bank of America. And…

Is Joel Osteen, Success Mag Cover Boy, Really “God’s Best”?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…oom of their Houston home. “I believe every person has potential that is still waiting to be released, or you wouldn’t be alive. I tell people all the time, ‘If you woke up and God gave you breath to breathe, then you’ve got something else you need to do. Somebody needs what you have. You have an assignment. You have something to offer the world.’ ” This quote is telling. Throughout the whole article, Osteen gushes his trademark gospel of positive…

NPR “Ex-Gay” Report Neither “Fair” Nor “Balanced”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…t of it. This should be the true focus of the story: where these men, and millions of other gays and lesbians get the message that their sexuality is something that is shameful and in need of changing or repressing. I have met plenty of non-religious gay and lesbian people who have not had to endure this kind of struggle. Certainly, they felt some societal pressures and prejudices, but for those who have not had to slay their image of God as a gay…

Like Azusa Street Baptized into Bureaucracy: Mexico’s Flourishing LLDM Church Loses its Apostle

By Michael Schulson

…cholarly estimates for LLDM’s worldwide population range as high as seven million. Still: LLDM is big. And it’s not easy to classify the church that has emerged. In terms of theology and ritual, its flavor is firmly pentecostal and charismatic: Church members receive baptism in the Holy Spirit as adults, undergo ritual healings, and occasionally speak in tongues. Interior of the LLDM Temple. In its history, aesthetics, and social structure, though…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…d, in the name of scientific materialism and in the interests of atheism, millions upon millions of people. Persons of faith were especially targeted, by a regime that at its end had murdered more than any other. (Like Islamic extremism, its actual motives may have been quite different.) But there is a fourth hole in this terrible Swiss Cheese of a tweet. What if you don’t produce good science because you can’t? Describing his (adopted) country’s…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…he film is positively voyeuristic! Let’s face it, gay sex is completely titillating to heterosexuals, especially conservative Christian heterosexuals. They can’t stop thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can cou…

The Radical Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Left’s Challenge Today

By Peter Laarman

…e use of napalm and Agent Orange to lay waste to the land and its people, killing millions of noncombatants in three countries (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). King broadens his critique of this war into a sobering look at how a country—ours—that once claimed to stand for revolutionary ideals became the ally of dictators and tyrants and counterrevolutionary forces everywhere. He cites examples of U.S.-sponsored counterinsurgency: Venezuela, Guatemal…

What Coverage of a Fatal Orthodox Baptism Reveals About Western Media

By Katherine Kelaidis

…West.” It did not and does not matter that Christianity was a significant pillar around which “Western” identity was built. Eastern Christians simply came to be seen as somehow not fully Christian. Nor did it seem to faze anyone that ancient Greek culture was heralded as the mythic ancestor of the West, while modern Greeks, nearly all at least cultural Orthodox Christians, were (and frequently still are) excluded from its shifting borders. Which b…

Rep. Cleaver’s ‘Awoman’ Prayer Enrages Christian Nationalists Who Taste Their Own Medicine and Still Miss the Point

By Andrew L. Seidel

…oed this prayer, telling the Virginia House of Delegates that “every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord.” The Georgia House suffered through a sermon and then a prayer, both of which condemned all non-Baptists to an eternity of torture and torment. With the “awoman” line, they finally got a taste—the smallest sample—of what it’s like for some of the rest of us; for the nonreligious, the religious minorities, the non-Chr…

The Burning Houses of Worship We Missed

By Gordon Haber

…el a twinge of concern whenever anything happens in Jerusalem. Notre Dame will take years and millions of euros to rebuild. The American church fires are just one more infuriating symptom of a nation turning against its own citizens, though it is encouraging that, in the wake of Notre Dame, donations to the Louisiana churches have begun to surge. I wouldn’t underplay the seriousness of what happened in Paris, Jerusalem, and Louisiana. But I do fin…