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More Than Big Hair and Money: Jim, Tammy Faye and the Media “Holy Wars” of the 80s

By John Wigger

…some of Jim and Tammy’s appeal. PTL was all about images so there were any number of options. Too bad books can’t come with a dozen different covers to choose from. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? I love the writing style of Lawrence Wright and Hampton Sides. They are both masters at weaving nonfiction into a page-turner. Anything half as good would be fine with me. What’s your next book? I’m not sure yet. Hopef…

Glenn Beck’s Salvation Army

By Peter Montgomery

…faith through a prism of American nationalism? Not to mention the growing number of Americans without any religious commitment? Beck tells us, “you must fall to your knees and you must reconnect with God. He is not asking you. He is commanding us as a people to get behind Him. He will right the wrongs. We will have to pay a price because we lived outside of His laws. We will have to pay a price, but every day we don’t get behind Him, the price ge…

Kirk Cameron Joins the Anti-Mormon Chorus
(Sort Of)

By Julie Ingersoll

While a number of conservative Christian leaders raise questions about Glenn Beck’s Mormonism, Worldview Matters’ host Brannon Howse continued his attack in a conversation with Kirk Cameron about why Cameron did not participate in Glenn Beck’s Divine Destiny. Howse marveled at the “thick irony” wherein Cameron (the actor who played Buck, the converted journalist warning about the “demonic spirituality of a one world religion” in the Left Behind m…

Orthodox Jews Begin to Reckon with Sexual Abuse

By Paul Berger

…ss prevalent in the Orthodox community than anywhere else; but there are a number of peculiarities to Orthodox Jewish life that have made the reporting of abuse less common than in society at large. “I think the subject of abuse is probably the same in any religious community,” says Michael Salomon, a Long Island psychiatrist, who has just finished working on an as-yet-unpublished book about sexual abuse in the Orthodox world. “Different religions…

Dear White Evangelicals: A Black Square Ain’t Gonna Cut It

By Jhas Williams

…to explain and tiring to unpack. After all, we don’t exactly have a racism-free America to compare it to since, sadly, such a nation has never existed. Besides, how does one person teach another to treat human beings like human beings? But I can tell you without a doubt that a start would have been not being able to count on one hand the number of Black children in my entire Christian school student-body. Do Black educators only exist in public sc…

Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

By Patricia Miller

…one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or who feels less horrible about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal, which had Boston at its epicenter. That’s a pretty low bar, but of course n…

8: The Mormon Proposition Gets It Right

By Joanna Brooks

…have dismissed the film as blatantly false. But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [See also Holly Welker’s review here. – Eds] Some take exception to editing choices that sequence events out of context for dramatic effect; others wish that the filmmakers had not been so cartoonish in their depictions of anti-gay-marriage standpoints, using only notori…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…big tent approach to coverage of American ir/a/religion. But do the Gallup numbers point to new ways we might be thinking about business as usual? Two findings are striking. First: Gallup reported that although Americans felt religion’s influence was declining, many—75 percent—agreed that more religion would be positive for the country. Not surprisingly, churchgoers were most gung-ho about religion’s beneficial impact. But “over half of those who…

The Best the Largest Progressive Jewish Org Could Come Up With?

By Jay Michaelson

…d Jewish Funds for Justice, the latter of which had already swallowed up a number of smaller Jewish social justice organizations. I know several people who work at BtA, and I commend them on their ability to keep a secret. I and friends of mine plied several of these folks with drinks, but their lips stayed sealed. (I did find out that the org would have an action-verb in it, as is the fashion these days, but that’s all.) That being said, I’m not…