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The Real Story Behind Rick Perry’s Secret Meetings with Pastors

By Sarah Posner

…lly scheduled for August 6. His group did not just participate in a single phone call, as Amy Sullivan reported at TIME, but gathered for a two-day meeting June 21-22, which was a follow-up to a meeting Robison convened last September. The same day that Robison wrote in a blog post that “Christians must respond to the invitation issued by the prophet Joel to ‘return to God’,” Perry announced his rally, saying, “Some problems are beyond our power t…

Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

By Kent L. Brintnall

…in mind. I can name the people who were my imagined audience. I have their numbers in my cell phone. There are, of course, lots of other people I would invite to eavesdrop on this solipsistic soliloquy. I’d like Bataille scholars to read the book. I’d like people who’ve never heard of Bataille to read the book. I’d like feminist and queer theologians—and those scholars who study queer theory—to read it. And if a serious scholar of Bacon’s or Mappl…

How Does an Atheist Come to Believe in God?: An Interview with Jacob Needleman

By Lisa Webster

…ills, I fished in my bag for the tiny microphone I planned to use with my iPhone, to record our conversation. “Is that what you’re using?” he asked, with great interest. He held up his own phone. “I just got one of these. Will this really work?” He sat next to me on the couch as I pointed him through the app store on his phone. “There it is,” I said, pointing to iTalk. “That’s what I’m using.” He tapped the screen, but the app that came up for dow…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…n-Christian, I kept waiting to notice the fact that I was listening to an evangelical pastor, but what Jesus talk there was seemed designed to float by. It did seem to mean something to many of those seated around me, though. Audience members asked Bell how to teach their children about Jesus without repeating anything they didn’t believe themselves; or how to respond to parents of the youth-group they lead who want to know how much they taught th…

What Can a Real Life Haunting Tell Us About American Religion? [Updated]

By Daniel Wise

…ouse. She reported that, whenever she tried to speak to this friend on the phone in the house about the haunting, the phone connection would be interrupted. As a busy woman with two kids, Maria doesn’t always have a lot of time to devote to spirituality, but when she does, she often relies on intuition. In the case of the haunting, she reports that her intuition pointed her toward the conclusion that it’s the land on which the house was built that…

Conservative Rep Grills Oklahoma Personhood Sponsors

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…m a court challenge that results in Roe v. Wade being overturned. So conservative legislators are caught in the middle, and the voters themselves are… well… making phone calls and holding marches, because what else is there to do? (When I called the office of one member of the Public Health Committee to register my opposition to SB-1433, the staffer on the phone said, “Goodness, it seems like everyone in Oklahoma is calling.” I wearily replied tha…

Godly Game or Godless Satire? Countering Biblical Ignorance with Heretical Humor

By Betsy Shirley

…s like ancient dice games, the original Olympics, the costumed Jewish festival-carnival of Purim, and the Hindu ritual of Holi, in which participants throw colored paint at each other, Bado-Fralick and Norris point out that religion and play are often inseparable. Throughout this long history, religious games and toys are “evidence of the ways in which religious institutions and practioners use cultural trends to breathe new life back into their t…

Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

By Andrew Aghapour

…Carter. That wasn’t the case at all. Some of the leading, most powerful, influential evangelical leaders were actually for Gerald Ford. There was a lot of diversity among evangelicals themselves that got masked by being lumped together in the polls as if they were all the same thing. Did these polls utilize categories that counted more people as evangelicals, relative to other measurements? They did. The way they got 50 million was basically inven…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…lphabet and has the numerical value of six. Therefore, according to Weick, Vav Vav Vav is 666—the infamous number of the Beast. The 666 theory does not, drinkers of Monster will be glad to hear, hold up. Here is the relevant passage from Revelation 13:18: “let 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’…

Global LGBT Recap: Nigeria Jails Gays, Russian Orthodox Spox Calls for Criminalization Referendum

By Peter Montgomery

…GBT pressure from abroad, he notes, “The irony is that it is the new conservative vanguard—anti-gay, anti-abortion and pro–“traditional family”—that has most successfully cultivated the West’s financial and institutional support.” The church’s close ties with American evangelicals reflect a shift in policy. For much of the post-Soviet period, the Russian Orthodox Church held evangelical denominations at arm’s length, fearing that they would compet…