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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…

Are They Jewish Bones? Battle for Separation of Synagogue & State in Israel

By Shalom Goldman

…slates roughly as “sacred space”) monitors construction and archaeological sites for news of any discoveries of bones. If their experts (they don’t trust government experts) suspect that the bones are the bones of the Jewish dead, the group will demonstrate, and lobby, to stop the project at hand. Rabbi David Shmidel, the head of Atra Kadisha, recently told a gathering of thousands of supporters that archaeologists and all “those who treat the bon…

Seek and Ye Shall Find… Anti-Gay Views

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…o Springs-based Christian search engine that only returns results from Web sites that are consistent with the Bible. He says SeekFind is designed “to promote what we believe to be biblical truth” and excludes sites that don’t meet that standard. Houdmann says a search on his site would not turn up pornography. If you search “gay marriage,” you would get results that argue against gay marriage. And if you type in “Democratic Party,” your first sear…

True Blood: When Marketing Goes For the Jugular

By Joseph Laycock

…tely confusing fact and fiction. This was primarily done online, where Web sites such as TruBeverage.com were created, complete with product descriptions of various synthetic blood types. Vampire profiles began to appear on Myspace, Facebook, and livejournal complete with fake news and fake discussions on how Tru Blood would affect the vampire political structure. YouTube clips began to circulate in which actors in fangs snarled into webcams that…

Why Did Vandals Try to Destroy a Holy Tree?

By Joseph Laycock

…essness of the destruction. Ironically, the social value ascribed to these sites made them ripe for sacrifice. Had the vandals been the only ones on Earth who knew about the Eye of the Needle, it may never have occurred to them to destroy it. Certainly, no sadistic impulse could be satisfied by destroying something that no one was able to appreciate. Instead these sites were the locus of communities, traditions, and histories stretching back centu…

YouTube Terrorism

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…y. Days later, further outbursts against American officials and diplomatic sites occur in two other Arab Muslim countries. The headlines are here stripped of their local names, not to protect the innocent but to show the pattern of a creeping violence that has precedence and yet, at another level, is unprecedented. What makes the current saga surreal is the seamless manner in which a hackneyed 14-month-old movie becomes the flashpoint for violenc…

On Whistleblowing, MLK, Jr., and the Politics of Resistance in the Digital Age

By Kevin Healey

…against their will—victims of so-called “revenge porn.” Operators of such sites have defended their business with arguments that are remarkably similar to those that issue from the highest levels of mainstream social media sites. As journalist Natasha Lennard has argued, such cases reveal that profit-driven rhetoric about sharing and openness is “underpinned by an immense privilege”—since those who boast of having nothing to hide rarely identify…

Sex Work: In Bed with the Religious Right

By Dagmar Herzog

…endations for spanking and light bondage, etc., in online Christian advice sites like The Marriage Bed. Another big misconception is that the best way to resist conservatism is to expose conservative hypocrisy. One of the most important things I learned in researching evangelical sex advice and therapy culture (which is a multibillion dollar industry) is how crucial exhibitionist, preemptive confessionalism has become. Evangelical advice-givers li…

The Black and White (and Blood-Red) Roots of ISIS

By Hasan Azad

…name of purifying Islam of “idols,” systematically been demolishing major sites of Islamic heritage throughout Mecca and Medina, such as the graves of vitally important Islamic personages. (Although they haven’t yet been able to do so, no doubt from fear of a major backlash from Muslims across the globe, there has long been serious talk of destroying the Prophet’s tomb – again, because, according to Wahhabi doctrine, it constitutes an “idol.”) In…