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Prosperity Gospel and Foreclosure

By Sarah Posner

…more and more animated while he preaches; the audience also is animated—almo*]}*st agitated—over the possibility of the blessings. Munsey takes off running up the fake stairs on the set, but they don’t go anywhere. “Oh!” he exclaims, surprised. “This is a dead end!” There is some uncomfortable laughter; it’s hard to imagine anyone not questioning Munsey’s brainpower in thinking the stairs went somewhere. Anyone in the room can see the stairs on the s…

Ten Commandments of the Antichrist: The Georgia Guidestones

By Joseph Laycock

…that, “Armageddon can be prevented.” Whoever planned the monument in 1979 most likely imagined that Armageddon would take the form of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. “R.C. Christian” could not possibly have predicted the events referenced by the vandals, such as the attacks of September 11 or the election of Barack Obama. But Dice, and others like him, read the Guidestones much as they read the Book of Revelation: not as historical artifacts b…

A Matter of the Heart: Talking to Gay Christian Rocker Jennifer Knapp

By Kristin Rawls

…e with her status as “Christian music artist,” she became the genre’s biggest star between 1998 and 2002, when—citing burnout—she walked away from the industry. Eight years later, Knapp returned with a mainstream rock album called Letting Go. And she came out publicly as a lesbian [as Douglas Harrison covered at that time, here on RD –Eds.]. Recently, I caught up with Knapp to discuss what motivated her to return to music and what she struggles wi…

It’s Not Raining Eligible Muslim Men

By Shabana Mir

…rd, I do not feel that marriage outside the faith is an ideal solution for most religious individuals. In my humble belief and experience, religion is a discipline and tradition that requires total living and immersion. Marriage is also a discipline and a process that requires the totality of one’s engagement. At least in my observation, I have not encountered many cases of successful service to these two masters. Then there is the issue of raisin…

Report from Paris During COP21: Let Us Not Commit Global Suicide

By Donna Schaper

…morial Church in New York City) and write on the ribbon what you will miss most when the temperatures rise too far to permit the earth’s amusement. You can enjoy headsets, which allow you to understand the Iranian who is talking about how he saved wetlands or the Sudanese woman who went from 28 women in an agricultural cooperative to 5000. You can learn about resilience in one lecture after another. What is resilience? Here’s what the Equatorial P…

The Atheist Encounter with Christianity: A Failure to Disbelieve?

By Paul Wallace

…eas you think hold you and your world together. Disbelieving is one of the most vitally important things people can do. Without disbelief there is no growth. To disbelieve is to live. To illustrate, take the average six-year-old child of Christian parents. This child probably thinks of God in highly anthropomorphic ways: God walks through Eden, God’s back turns to Moses, God sits on a throne in heaven, “up there.” Also the stories of scripture (th…

Of God, But Not God: A Methodist Minister Speaks About Church’s Refusal to Open Its Doors to LGBT

By Joel Pitney

…I’ve had to work harder. I’ve been willing to do that. And I have for the most part enjoyed my 40 years of ministry. It’s great to hear about your history with gender issues in the church. I think it lays a good foundation for exploring your perspective on the LGBT issues on the table at [this year’s] General Conference. When I think about your ministry, I think of you as a long-time champion of this issue. Why do think it ended up being such a d…

The Religious Right’s Apocalyptic Visions of an Obama Presidency

By Bill Berkowitz

…tory note to the “Letter,” Focus on the Family Action points out that “the most reliable way of predicting people’s future actions is by looking at their past actions,” concluding: “So here is a picture of the changes that are likely or at least very possible if Senator Barack Obama is elected and the far-left segments of the Democratic Party gain control of the White House, the Congress, and perhaps then the Supreme Court.” While FFA is savvy eno…

Crisis in Sudan: ‘If the World Stands Idly By This Time, They Will Bring Genocide’

By Frederick Clarkson

…hartoum regime not only does not speak for all Arabs and Muslims, but that most of the victims of Khartoum’s genocide in Darfur, were Muslims. But in his region of the Nuba Mountains, he emphasizes, “there are marriages between Christian and Muslim families, so we are showing the world how to live together. We know how to build relationships based on mutual trust and respect.” War Without End? South Kordofan is but the latest front in the civil wa…

The Jihadi Revolution is Dead (But Bin Laden’s Death Didn’t Kill It)

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…rimary lieutenant, al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian medical doctor who joined the most extreme Islamist jihadi movement years ago, convinced that only violent guerilla warfare would topple someone like Mubarak. Tahrir Square clearly showed that Zawahiri was wrong. In a couple of weeks of protests, the peaceful resistors demonstrated the moral and strategic legitimacy of nonviolent struggle. And they succeeded, where years of jihadi bloodshed had not prod…