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RDPulpit: Ahmadinejad Gives Another Victory to the Israeli Right

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

…ntury and sought to provide protection for Jews who were treated as second-class citizens in both Christian Europe and Muslim countries for many hundreds of years. The desire for a safe haven made perfect sense, though the antagonism that they encountered from many Palestinians made perfect sense as well given the previous history of Western colonialism and Christian crusades. Palestinians saw the Jews as an invading force that would uproot their…

Capricology: Television, Tech, and the Sacred

By Diane Winston

…ith organized crime and with the distrust of their new government. It is a classic immigrant story, made all the more poignant by the contrast between the two brothers: one tattooed in ways which make it impossible for him to deny his own identity, while the other seeks to mask his identity, having adopted an assimilating name and demeanor. He refuses his mother-in-law’s suggestion that he take his son back to the world they came from, yet he’s co…

The Kids are Religious Right: Punk Rock & Pro-Life

By Justin Philpot

…ear their fingertips on guitar strings and scream unintelligibly into microphones. All the elements of the indie scene announce themselves: the spiky haircuts, the leather, combat boots, the wide eyes, the acne. At one recent show, Matt Koldinski… took the mike and did something that would be unthinkable at most hardcore shows. Panting and solemn, he appealed to his audience of peers to come up to him after the show, to talk about their problems a…

McCain’s Prosperity Preacher

By Sarah Posner

…as diverse as personal self-help and the Rapture are packaged and sold as books, DVDs, and CDs. (One might wonder why all that self-help matters if the Rapture is coming as soon as Hagee says it is.) He writes roughly a book a year on topics ranging from the coming apocalypse to spousal relationships to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. What gets lost in the cataloging of Hagee’s verbal atrocities, though, is the broader portrait of Hagee, and his friend…

A Lone Blogger vs. the McCain-Hagee Alliance

By Bruce Wilson

…-Semitism. Hagee adds some contemporary touches—such as his variation on a classical conspiracy theory alleging that “international financial power brokers based in Europe” seek to control the world. That class of conspiricism derives from the Protocols of The Elders of Zion and also from Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic tract, deeply influential in Germany in the years preceding the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich, “The International Jew”—a document that,…

RDBook: Power Belongs to God

By Nathan Schneider

…e for me to explain away the Bush Doctrine as oil and realpolitik, or even class resentment, until I spent a day at a “prophecy conference” in a packed church in affluent Santa Barbara, California. Don’t worry about human suffering in the Middle East, the pastors taught, worry about God’s will. People nodded and took notes, and in that room everything I thought I knew about the world felt worthless before the vision of mystical order. Talk like th…

Gandhi, his Grandson, Israel, and the Jews

By Shalom Goldman

…erican public opinion (think of the controversy surrounding Jimmy Carters’ book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, for instance). While the initial outcry about any public criticism of Israeli policies most often comes from Jewish organizations, (like the Anti-Defamation League, and AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) there is a very wide, though surely not universal, American Christian support for Israeli governmental actions—appro…

The Immorality of Immortality

By Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

…to a non-biological entity and thereby achieve immortality. Ray Kurzweil‘s book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005), articulates the transhumanist vision of cyberimmortality most forcefully when it imagines a “brain-porting scenario” that will involve “scanning a human brain capturing all of the salient details.” This will entail reinstantiating the brain’s state in a different—most likely much more powerful—comp…

Catholic Bishops Do Siskel & Ebert

By Kate Childs Graham

…ergy, and—you guessed it—human sexuality. After review, the films are then classified into the following categories: A-I—general patronage, A-II—adults and adolescents, A-III—adults, L—limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling, and O—morally offensive. Here is a sampling of movies in a few of the categories: A-I: The USCCB Office of Film and Broadcasting denotes that this category is rare as “nowadays…

Op-Ed: Ramadan and Religious Freedom

By Sumbul Ali-Karamali

…The Pew Research Center has found that American Muslims are mostly middle-class and mainstream; Islam is one of many American faiths. During the Ramadan that fell in December of 2001, Pope John Paul II urged Christians to fast for one day in solidarity with Muslims. I was so moved that I felt a rush of gratitude and awe. The “solidarity fast“ was evidence that, instead of using Ramadan—a holiday that reminds us to empathize with others—to instiga…