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Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

By Sarah Posner

…e years, including: • Kenneth Copeland and his wife Gloria live in a 20,000-square-foot lake-front mansion near Fort Worth, TX. They regularly fly one or the other of their two expensive jets and other airplanes around the world, including regular trips to their multi-million chalet-style mansion in Steamboat Springs, Colo. • Tony Palmer, a former employee of Copeland, is ordained with the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches (CEEC), a smal…

Play to Extinction: Religious Groups Unite Against Predatory Gambling

By Frederick Clarkson

…ivil rights movement Taylor Branch, who says that raising revenue via state-supported gambling addiction is a betrayal of the citizens and an avoidance of critical questions about our democracy: what do we want our government to do and how we are going to pay for it? “State-sponsored predatory gambling is essentially a corruption of democracy,” he said recently. “[T]his violates our social compact, and the trust we must have in the belief that we…

Lifestyles of the Rich and Pious

By Patricia Miller

…is King but you can get your birth control at 7-11” Dolan lives in a 15,000-square foot neo-Gothic mansion on Madison Avenue appraised at $30 million. • Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who warned a few years back that the local gay pride parade might “morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan,” lives in a “one of a kind,” 19-chimneyed mansion in the heart of Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood conservatively valued at $14.3 million. And he is w…

Air Kissing the Mezuzah: Religion and Science Collide in Fight Against Virus

By Shalom Goldman

…divine intercession from the air were made by a group of rabbis in the mid-1990s; they were praying for an end to the numerous suicide bombings of that period. For these “flying rabbis” (as the BBC has dubbed them), what to name the threatening pandemic was in itself a problem. The Israeli government initially referred to the virus as shapaat hazirim (“swine flu”), but officials of the Ministry of Health, which is controlled by the Ultra-Orthodox…

What Coverage of a Fatal Orthodox Baptism Reveals About Western Media

By Katherine Kelaidis

…arly those who rejected the baptism of infants, eventually returned to full-immersion baptism. It’s the medieval, pre-Reformation context that’s important here, however. Because like many ancient liturgical practices retained in the East, full-immersion baptism became an important marker of Eastern Christian identity—particularly as increasingly numbers of Eastern Christians became the simultaneous targets of Western crusaders and Islamic conquero…

Norway Massacre Suspect Anders Behring Breivik, Hitler, & the Jerusalem Post Editorial

By Sarah Posner

…himself more difficult, because the Holocaust unleashed “the greatest anti-nationalist and anti-European propaganda campaign the world has ever seen.” As a result, “people like myself, and other cultural conservative leaders of today, are still suffering under this propaganda campaign because of that one man.” Breivik further blames Hitler for failing to “liberate Jerusalem” from “Islamic occupation” and deporting European Jews to Israel. Instead…

US Archbishop and Vatican-Appointed “Overseer” Attends Annual Meeting of Women Religious

By Emily Baxter

…embly, the sisters officially called for gun control legislation and signed 800 postcards demanding Congress members to pass immigration reform. As LCWR past-president, Sr. Pat Farrell said to the Assembly, “Expressing what we really think and feel, with transparency and vulnerability, is for the brave of heart. It is, however, what we are being asked to do in our current conflict. All of a sudden the world is looking to us.” Like this story? You…

Behind the Inclusive-Sounding Ads of this $100 Million PR-Blitz-for-Jesus it’s the Same Old Conservative Christian Fantasy

By Chrissy Stroop

…music is straight out of the manipulative megachurch worship service’s tug-on-the-heartstrings playbook—as someone who grew up partly in “seeker-sensitive” evangelicalism, I ought to know. The ads also feature mostly people of color, but interestingly enough, in the photo of the Signatry’s board of directors featured on its website, I count eleven white men, three men of color, and one white woman. Don’t think that disconnect will go unnoticed by…

Reading Beinart and Lerner as Gaza Burns

By Ira Chernus

…years. Before their change of heart, most weren’t even aware of the decades-old Jewish-American peace movement, so they can only compare the situation now with what it was a few years ago when they joined the effort for peace with such high hopes. Naturally they are disheartened. But for those of us who have been involved in this work for decades, the huge increase in our numbers in recent years is sufficient cause for optimism—not necessarily abo…

On the Taliban’s Hit List: An Exiled Pakistani Singer’s Plea to Save Music

By Austin Dacey

…of some great literary and musical work of the Sufis. Pashtuns also have a number of great poets and saints, who always used music as a strong medium for spreading their message of peace and love. The Saudi-funded Wahabi sect, however, is said to be against this philosophy. The heart of every Pashtun bled when the tomb of the great Pashto poet and mystic, Rahman Baba, was brutally attacked by the disciples of the Wahabi sect recently in Peshawar….