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“Taliban Dan’s” Teacher: Inside Bill Gothard’s Authoritarian Subculture

By Sarah Posner

…ealth,” Gothard told me, “which is taking care of stress first.” Now the Peruvians, he said, want to be a “model world nation.” That, he added, “to me is like the example of what we’ve been working for all these years.” Webster, whose office did not respond to an interview request, repeatedly insisted to the local press when he served in the Florida legislature from 1980 through 2008 that he would not apply Gothard’s teachings in his official duti…

The Heresy of End Times Predictions

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ee that he or she anticipates the end atimes with eager anticipation. This world, the world of the here and now and the everyday, is a world given over—not necessarily to the Antichrist—but certainly to sin and corruption and matter. The apocalyptically-minded may breezily leave that world to the corporate raiders, the plutocrats, the polluters, the empires, the sexually suspect, the violent and abusive, and so on. Such wicked people may do all th…

A Devil’s Dozen of the Best ‘New Religion Journalism’ Books of the Decade

By Ed Simon

…ts to identify individuals who are Jewish (or whom they think are Jewish), New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman used the symbol in an act of reclamation and resistance against ascendant antisemitism. Drawing from his own experience, as well as analyzing the rise in hate crimes and speech against Jews both internationally and in the United States, Weisman provides a powerful voice about what it means and feels like to have such hate directed towa…

Politics in a Time of Crisis: Sandy? Blame Socialism

By Haroon Moghul

…leans Katrina, a disaster that helped doom the Bush Presidency; last year, New York City went into overdrive, going out of its way to be ready for Irene. That was a good thing, and thank God Irene wasn’t as bad as we thought she might be. This time around, maybe last year’s preparations will make New York City’s recovery from this disaster more efficient and more complete—perhaps people are alive today because of how seriously local, state, and fe…

Opponents of Marriage Equality Confident of Defeating Last-Minute Push

By Michael Tracey

…te GOP legislators. Polling data has consistently shown that a majority of New Yorkers, and now even a majority of Americans, favor marriage equality. And indeed, rumors leaking into the press today suggest victory may be within reach, though advocates won’t rest until the votes are in. Conservative religious groups, meanwhile, who’ve spent months imploring lawmakers not to capitulate in the face of mounting public pressure, are cautiously confide…

Global LGBT Recap: Mandela and Equality; Elton John Defies Russian Ban; Fake-Healing of AIDS

By Peter Montgomery

…e rights of LGBT people is an integral part of U.S. foreign policy. And in New York City on Tuesday, December 10, International Human Rights Day, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power met with an international group of LGBT rights activists at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. The gathering was described as a “roundtable strategy session on ways U.S.foreign policy can align more powerfully with LGBT communities globally to ensure LGBT r…

Rewriting the History of Catholic Schools in America

By Marian Ronan

…it he highlights the signal role Hughes, his predecessor as archbishop of New York, played in the establishment of the Catholic school system in America. Hughes first “struggled to rid the New York public schools in the 1840s of their anti-Catholic bias,” but then went on to found an independent Catholic school system to preserve the faith of future Catholics. Dolan acknowledges in his article that a number of other Catholic bishops shared this c…

“I Had No Intention to Write Atheistically”: Darwin, God, and the 2500-Year History of the Debate

By Edward J. Larson

…the book, Dawkins adds, “Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no crusades, no witch-hunts,” and so on: A world without religion, he says, and nothing good is missing. As Dawkins sees it, belief in God and religion once served a Darwinian purpose by helping to bind small tribes together in opposition to others. Now that those small, competing tribes have become large nations or ethnic groups with access to weapons of mass destruction, howe…

Churches Can No Longer Hide the Truth: Daniel Dennett on the New Transparency

By Andrew Aghapour

…ne and practice. Our digital information age, he argues, is ushering in a “new world of universal transparency” where religious institutions can no longer hide the truth. To survive in an age of transparency, religions will need to come to terms with the facts. Dennett spoke recently with The Cubit about institutional transparency, the parallels between religious and atheistic fundamentalism, and the future of religion. You describe non-believing…

No, the Democratic Party Is (Still) Not the Party of God

By Daniel José Camacho

…heterosexual ideology sustaining capitalism are rather distasteful for our times, times in which philanthropic foundations can be saviors and breaking up a few big banks is pie-in-the-sky. King wrote about the problem of gradualism and spoke about “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.” Yet, it’s clear—just as it was in his day—that although liberal Christians shower such stances with praise, few actually dare to follow. Liber…