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Beyond Alarmism and Denial in the Dominionism Debate

By Anthea Butler

…who are in that web don’t often recognize differences, or they don’t care about them. They care about their spiritual lives, and that’s what keeps these movements going. They can go from one meeting to the next if they have the funds to do so, and the highs are good. Who doesn’t want to go to a meeting that feeds your soul where you meet like-minded people? All of the groups are enmeshed in a symbiotic web. These evangelists’, apostles’, and lead…

Mass Bible-Based Sexual Dysfunction as Root of Culture Wars? Frank Schaeffer Breaks It Down

By Frank Schaeffer

…om and God was my first and only title, though at one point I was thinking about another subtitle: “A Religiously Obsessed Sexual Memoir.” How do you feel about the cover? Jonathan Sainsbury who designed it is brilliant. I love it. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. It inspired me when I was a teen, made my mind race then and still does now. It’s one of the best novels…

A Daily Utopia: Creating Our Moral Values Every Day

By Anna Peterson

…or entire books in themselves. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? That utopianism is some sort of science fiction, irrelevant to real life. That ethics can be compartmentalized. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I hope for what we call a “well-educated general audience,” meaning that I have tried to write for people who do not have Ph.D.s in ethics. I think, in particular, of my friends who are not a…

Where Do “Sacred” Values Live in the Brain?

By Arri Eisen

…believe and in how we understand belief? I teach a college course called “Science & the Nature of Evidence,” in which that question is considered at length. Few of my students (few of any of us, perhaps) have thought about it, and they love the chance to take it on. It matters what we believe and why we believe it. Not just in terms of religious identification, not just for deciding what and how we do things in our day-to-day lives, but also in r…

GOP Presidential Candidates’ Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

By Paul Wallace

…mental and scientifically uncontroversial idea undergirding all biological science. Paul’s fellow candidates Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are candid about their hostility toward evolution. Both support Creationism 2.0, also known as intelligent design. “I support intelligent design,” Bachmann told reporters earlier this year. “There is reasonable doubt on both sides.” And Perry, in a 2010 interview, said, “I am a firm believer in intelligent de…

Fascinating History of Search for “Lost White Tribe” Sheds Light on Construction of Race

By Michael Schulson

…assification; a taxonomic tool; a construct. And it generally reveals more about the seer than about the object of sight. The human form is diverse. Maybe these explorers did see people whom a modern American would code as white. Maybe not. As Robinson demonstrates in The Lost White Tribe, the better questions here have to do with the interpretation of bodies, not just with the bodies themselves. Basically: why were European and American adventure…

Romney and the End-Times

By Sarah Posner

…ngs here. First, except for the part about Missouri, what Romney is saying about LDS belief about Christ’s return doesn’t deviate that much from what many evangelicals believe. I’m not in any way endorsing apocalyptic biblical literalism or proof-texting here, or saying that all Mormons or all evangelicals believe this. I’m just pointing out that Romney was relying on the same parts of the Bible many evangelicals do about Christ’s return. For exam…

Savoring the Haterade: Why Jews Love Dara Horn’s ‘People Love Dead Jews’

By Shaul Magid

…ove dead Jews. And certainly not most Jews. People Love Dead Jews has only about ten pages about the Talmud, and even these don’t really tell us all that much other than that some Jews seem to love it. But you don’t have to love Talmud for people to love dead Jews. That’s not required. As Horn tells it, all you have to do is be a Jew. So then why do I need Talmud, I might as well be a Jew because people hate me? And therein lies the problem. The g…

Christian Punk Meets American Pop; Evangelicals in the ’Burbs

By Brittany Shoot

…found it inclusive. A few years later, I went to graduate school to write about the culture of “family values,” and I found that not much had been written about the music and popular culture of Christians. Do you have a personal connection to the movements you describe in the book? I do not have a personal connection to evangelical Christianity. I don’t think I met a born-again Christian until college. Still, I’m familiar with religious subcultur…

The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ‘n’ Roll

By Eric C. Miller

…same-sex marriage, national health care, etc. What can this study teach us about evangelical cultural engagement more broadly? In the book, I wanted to talk about evangelicalism in a way that went beyond politics, because there has already been quite a bit of focus on conservative Christianity and politics—to a considerable extent, historians care about these religious groups specifically because they are politicized. But a lot of their activity i…