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New Film Chronicles Unlikely Friendship in Battle Over God and Guns

By Sarah Posner

…upied by unarmed black teenagers, came to share her story with an activist best known for his graphic protests outside abortion clinics. For each of them, that first encounter was charged with trepidation and fear. McBath, a Lutheran-turned-Pentecostal whose family has roots in the civil rights movement, had yet to meet a religious leader who saw gun violence as a spiritual and moral issue and was willing commit to speaking out about it. Schenck,…

Pope Tweeted into Retirement

By Rachel Wagner

…previous pontiff, Pope John Paul II, saw the creation of the Vatican’s website in 1994, not long after the Internet became available for popular use. The Internet Explorer browser was launched in 1995, and the Palm Pilot first appeared in 1996. When John Paul first took office, SMS (texting) and Google were still several years in the future. Use of the Internet in the early nineties for most people consisted largely of acquiring plane tickets, re…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…top 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 count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…

Can a Greek Monastery Be Ground Zero of Global Financial Meltdown?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ols operate with surprising inefficiency, with students scoring the lowest numbers in Europe despite having four times as many teachers as Europe’s highest ranked system, in Finland. There are there separate government owned defense corporations. As for Greek health care, it is unclear whether waste or outright theft by state employees is the greater drain on a hopelessly overburdened system. And then there are the pensions: all men who work in p…

Pop-Eye: Meat The Wrestler

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…soul in power, the body a mere marionette. Several of the religious review sites described Randy’s body in metaphorical terms: Randy’s heart attack was really a comment on his loneliness, a broken heart over his daughter’s estrangement, and the utter lack of any other community. Reviewers persisted in maintaining this dualism, that the double identities Randy and Cassidy both share ultimately want to get to some core non-physical identity, some ma…

Build the Muslim Community Center at Ground Zero

By Donna Schaper

…olence, has a long reach into a person’s future. A community center on the site of the bombing would create another picture of another kind of future, one with respect and hope at its heart. What about forgiveness? It can be such a cheap word. It is obnoxious the way so many people tell other people they need to forgive the wrong done to them. Often those of us who advocate forgiveness don’t know what we are talking about. Then again, there is rea…

Playing Hooky: Will Boycott of Catholic Church Spur Reform?

By Nathan Schneider

…es on. Not attending mass for a faithful Catholic is at worst a sin and at best a pity. It weakens the spiritual bonds of community, the very bonds of trust and unity that we’ll need most when the time comes for change. The mass and the eucharist simply don’t make sense as the site for holding a boycott. It runs the risk of directing one’s protest against the church’s sacraments, rather than against the human beings who mishandle them. More urgent…

Taking Evangelical Support of Israel at Face Value Is a Terrible Idea: A Response

By Chrissy Stroop

…istian Zionism, and its usually concomitant apocalypticism, of “paranoia.” Best even dismissed prominent evangelical author and pastor John Hagee’s view that God ostensibly used Hitler to forward his divine plan of gathering the Jews in Israel as mere “dabbling in anti-Semitism.” As I argued in a rebuttal likewise published by The Forward, Best’s breezy, dismissive whitewashing of the more unseemly aspects of evangelicals’ support for (the most ag…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

Battling for the Soul of the Democratic Party

By Sarah Posner

…ca are (and, moreover, in the wake of Obama’s election, who will get their phone calls returned from the White House) certain names keep cropping up. Pastor Rick Warren, who sees no daylight between his views and James Dobson’s, but who, according to Sullivan’s book, former-DNC-chair Terry McAuliffe blasphemously didn’t know; Jim Wallis, best-selling author and activist who lambasts the religious right for its petty intolerance and the left for “n…