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Dreaming Cyborg Dreams: Virtual Identity and Religious Experience

By Rachel Wagner

…st and game theorist Miroslaw Filiciak calls “liquid identity.” One of the problems of virtual identity became apparent last spring in a course I taught entitled “Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality.” I wanted to show my students the new virtual hajj experience sponsored by Islamicity.com in the online world of Second Life. When I forgot my password, my student Jonathan offered to log in and allow us to visit the site with his avatar. Unfortunate…

The Religious Education of John McCain

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…he lay of the land.” McCain eventually rejected both endorsements. But his problems with evangelicals lingered, even after securing the Republican nomination. McCain learned, however, how to woo the evangelical base by giving his short, rat-a-tat answers at Rick Warren’s televised candidate forum. Warren asked: How would you approach evil? “Defeat it,” McCain responded. How to define marriage? “A union between man and woman.” When is a baby entitl…

Progressive & Religious

By Robert P. Jones

…owerful prophetic religious voice can provide a strong critique of what is wrong and broken in our society, and the passion to inspire people to step up and make sacrifices to work for real change. How do you feel about the cover? I’m happy with the cover, especially the main title, “Progressive & Religious,” in large orange stylized script. We decided to go without any cover images, mostly because it was difficult to think about an image that…

RDBook: Christian Culture Clash

By Krista Kapralos

…, gay orientation seems to be spreading and normalized. Those are all huge problems for evangelicals. But the evangelicals will look at it and say, “The government is not the answer. The answer is a changed heart.” Do evangelicals feel attacked by liberals, and vice versa? Liberals are frustrated with the fact that the only moral voice in the public square is supposedly from the evangelical community. On the other hand, evangelicals have some real…

New Book Reveals How Faith is Like a Covert Operation for the Bush Family

By Frederick Clarkson

…1994] his partying, his womanizing, and in particular his military service problems—posed a serious threat to his presidential ambitions. Their solution was to wipe the slate clean—through religious transformation.” A Tale of Two Conversions For this to work they needed “a credible conversion experience and a presentable spiritual guide.” And so the legend goes that none other than Billy Graham paid a visit to his longtime friends at the Bush fami…

Revelations from Family of Secrets (an addendum)

By Frederick Clarkson

…w W. was an abuser of illegal drugs in addition to his apparently drinking problems as a young man. One important story from W.’s past that has long been rumored is confirmed in this book. It is a story that perhaps as much as his going AWOL from the National Guard and orchestrating a cover-up could have derailed his political career. And that story is the illegal abortion he obtained for a girlfriend in Texas before Roe v. Wade. This is substanti…

Roll Over Lenin: Russian Church Elects New Patriarch

By Konstantin Petrenko

…ty of the Moscow Patriarchate. The Church has encountered the most serious problems in Ukraine, where many Orthodox parishes have established their own unrecognized patriarchate based in Kyiv, leading to a split within the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In Ukraine’s unstable political environment, churches often become a weapon in election campaigns, and Ukrainian politicians are likely to exploit the religious controversy to their advantage as the 20…

Don’t Blame Secularism: Reading Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion

By Jeffrey Feldman

…ical passion on certain issues for short-term gain. Two years later, large numbers of evangelical voters had already shaken off Rovianism and were openly embracing supposedly ‘secular’ issues (e.g. poverty, environmentalism), while large numbers of Democrats were openly embracing supposedly ‘religious’ issues (e.g. faith, family values). Cold War 2.0: American Ignorance of Central Asia ‘Secularism,’ as Marshall’s Blind Spot argues, however, suffer…

RDBook: Selling the Good News

By Sarah Posner

…he strongest last two chapters, does Walton train his laser clarity on the problems with both these ministries’ theology and methodology—or as he calls it, their aesthetics and ethics. Here, Walton lays bare some glaring shortfalls revolving around gender, race, injustice, and the divide between the “priestly” and the “prophetic.” Walton skillfully demonstrates how his subjects have benefitted from promoting the ideas that spiritual righteousness…

Freeman Dyson, American Heretic

By Michael J. Altman

…important to Dyson, it’s that there are more important and solvable global problems: nuclear arms, poverty, overfishing, and species extinction to name a few. And so we find the final sacrament in the story. Humanity. More than a heretic, an esoteric, or a skeptic (or any other –ic we might apply) Dyson is a humanist. This brings us back to ideology. For Dyson, for Gore, for Hansen and for all of us invested in protecting the planet and life on it…