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Election Day: Hope, Heartbreak, Naiveté, and Studs Terkel

By The Editors

…y that the two major presidential candidates hold a nationally televised forum on faith that is moderated by an evangelical Christian minister? What does it say about our vaunted religious pluralism when false rumors designed as smear tactics that Osama is a Muslim have such traction? Why is there such outrage against a religious leader who speaks prophetically about the nation’s sins and failures? The First Amendment wasn’t only intended to keep…

Pope Warns of “Christianophobia”

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…s are the most oppressed and tormented minority” in present circumstances, worldwide. This is a stunning conclusion, and we have not one word about what metric Benedict has used to draw it. He contents himself with several horrifying anecdotes about Christians massacred at Mass in Baghdad, and a spiking trend of Islamic anti-Christian violence that he insists must be named as such in order to be confronted and defeated. He even coins a term for th…

Mark Driscoll Hate-Tweets as Pope Benedict Flip-Flops: This Week in Religion and Social Media

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ess defines Mark Driscoll, the “gentle voice” of the Holy Father’s for his World Communication Day message is hard to recognize in the tone of his earlier message for World Peace Day on January 1. Here, after another year of astonishing religion-infused violence and hate across the world, and just a week before the Sandy Hook shootings, the Pope laid responsibility the lack of world peace largely at the feet of those who support abortion rights or…

Dreaming Beyond the Madman: Reflections on the Revolution in Libya

By Haroon Moghul

…e future Ataturk. Italian occupation, and all its violence, lasted through World War II. After a brief rule by a monarchy, a young army officer overthrew the king and established a radical revolutionary state in 1969. This would be some kind of socialist and Third-Worldist bastion of freedom, or so the rhetoric went. It is perhaps not too horrific to imagine that, if America were Libya, we would still be ruled by Richard Nixon. What exactly Qaddaf…

After Ferguson: America Must Abandon “Sick Christianity” at Ease With Violence

By Willie James Jennings

…e in a world formed in the wake of violence and death. Yet the son’s final words to his father express his desire to leave his father’s world of predator creatures, to which his father says, “me too.” While it’s not possible to leave our world of predator creatures, what can be left behind is the fear that draws the predator creature out of us and sends it marauding through black and Hispanic communities. What must be left behind is a form of poli…

Freezing Our Way to a Fiery Hell?

By Steve A. Wiggins

…ar temperatures that affect everyone. Why don’t I think of the rest of the world when I’m dressing like an Inuit to wait for the bus? I need to turn my eyes to the sky. The world is the one thing we all share and the atmosphere covers us all. Unless we can sustain our concern over global warming, snow days will become mere memories of a more temperate past. For now I have to get to work. Photo of NYC blizzard by flickr user Sarah_Ackerman via Cr…

How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

By Christopher D. Cantwell

…d Series,” where events in the United States determine a victor, but as a “World Cup,” where an international diversity of teams are on display. There’s a certain irony here, in that an Anglophone movement that once saw itself as uniquely positioned to save the world is now looking to the globe to salvage its reputation. But it’s also indicative of the historiography that Noll, Marsden, and Bebbington helped found. In the rush to find the metaphor…

The Theology of Westboro: The “World’s Meanest Church” Is More Than Picket Signs

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…have advanced degrees. Many people in the church are athletes, especially runners, who compete on the local level, and Topeka, Kansas, where the church is located, is a city of over 125,000 people—not a big city but also not a rural backwater. Also only one church member—founding pastor Fred Phelps, who died over a year ago—was from the South. Our decision to depict anti-LGBT bigots using these stereotypes reveals some larger cultural prejudices….

Obama’s Bunker-Busters to Israel

By Sarah Posner

…the Antichrist—identified by Hagee as the head of the European Union—will rule “a one-world government, a one-world currency and a one-world religion” for three and a half years. (He adds that “one need only be a casual observer of current events to see that all three of these things are coming into reality.”) The “demonic world leader” will then be confronted by a false prophet, identified by Hagee as China, at Armageddon, the Mount of Megiddo i…

First Congregational UCC, Ripon Wisconsin

Cheese State Reality Check: On The Wisconsin Idea and the Social Gospel

By Daniel Schultz

…ore or less openly premised on the Social Gospel understanding of the good news as concrete service to society. Alas, the moment did not last. Things fell apart during World War I and just before. LaFollette split the Republican party in 1912, leading to Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party, then opposed American entry into the war, causing his own movement to fall into mutual recrimination. Nevertheless, Raushenbush thinks there’s something to be s…