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War on Christmas Affirmed by Southern Baptist Convention

…elf for the backlash created by offensive resolutions. I’ve done this since 1997 when I was awakened by a phone call from a Lutheran friend that began, “What’s with you Southern Baptists and Mickey Mouse?” I was unaware that the messengers voted on a resolution to boycott Disney because of its policies toward homosexuals. One resolution approved by the messengers this year that may not be so widely publicized is a resolution “On Affirming the Use…

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A Religious History of American Neuroscience

…me in the SPR threw themselves behind a new contraption called the “psycho-phone” through which the inventors claimed to be hearing the voices of angels. The psychophone no doubt sounds absurd, but I can’t say that it sounds much more far-fetched than a transcranial magnetic stimulator. Both demonstrate the enduring cultural impulse toward techno-theologizing. However much neuroscientists might want to forswear an interest in the metaphysics of th…

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Aliens To Arrive in Alabama Today!

…reacher William Miller proclaimed that Jesus would return between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. When Christ did not appear, Miller and uncovered a mistake in his reasoning and offered a revised date: October 22, 1844. It became known as The Great Disappointment. Such are the risks of prophesying a specific date. Since their emergence in the 1950s, UFO-religions have also shown an apocalyptic bent, a tendency fueled by the threat of nuclear a…

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Friending Pope Benedict on Facebook?

…n Paul II, Pope Benedict sent the following text message to Italian mobile phone users: “Let us go forth in the joy of the risen Lord and trusting in his permanent help.” JPII had been texting Italians with a “thought of the day” while he was still alive, so Benedict was simply carrying on this tradition. Pope Benedict has more recently used text messaging to communicate with attendees throughout this year’s World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia. H…

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A Color-Blind America? Don’t Fall For The Okey-Doke

…gushing waterfall, some of which seemed to be making its way through to my phone. I received a swarm of text messages and emails from different people I know across the country, arriving almost simultaneously: This is the best moment in my lifetime, politically. Shout out to the ancestors who r rejoicing with us 2night! Oh yeah. President Obama! A new day is on the way! Yes GOD can! Yes we can! They didn’t want to give us 40 acres and a mule so da…

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Battling for the Soul of the Democratic Party

…ca are (and, moreover, in the wake of Obama’s election, who will get their phone calls returned from the White House) certain names keep cropping up. Pastor Rick Warren, who sees no daylight between his views and James Dobson’s, but who, according to Sullivan’s book, former-DNC-chair Terry McAuliffe blasphemously didn’t know; Jim Wallis, best-selling author and activist who lambasts the religious right for its petty intolerance and the left for “n…

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An Immigrant’s Tale: The Pull of the Homeland

…seen little other than Brooklyn and small town Illinois take long, cramped flights to dusty Lahore and crowded Cairo. Young women raised in the comfort of suburban Virginia and the freedom of college campuses take long, hot summer vacations with curious, opinionated relatives in Jeddah and Teheran. It is from first generation immigrants that the American-born Muslims learn this yearning for the homeland. First generation immigrant Muslims are a wh…

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Recovering From Rejection: The Second Coming of Ted Haggard

…the Earth.” The cracker barrel-styled reading of Acts—and of I Corinthians 13 at the prayer meeting the week before where 150 people reportedly swarmed his house—are emblematic of Pastor Ted’s uncanny, Zelig-like talent for reflecting the emerging Christian Right zeitgeist of the moment. In the mid-1980s, the so-called Charismatic and Pentecostal “shift in gravity” from the Deep South westward had much less to do with a random vision to build a c…

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Religion at Decade’s End

…ary discussion of the resurgence of politicized neo-traditional religion is 1979, not 2001.   It was in 1979 that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary movement seized power in Iran.  It was in 1979 that Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority in the United States and began lobbying hard, not just for a fundamentalist return to the political arena, but for the neo-conservative agenda of then–candidate Ronald Reagan.   It was in 1979 that John Pau…

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‘Biblical’ Disaster in Haiti: Pat Robertson and the Curse of Unyielding Ignorance

…lation of Haiti is somewhere around thirty percent. In Port-au-Prince that number jumps to almost forty percent. The majority of these churches are Pentecostal. These churches are overwhelmingly independent, indigenous Haitian entities, though some are linked to North American denominational Pentecostal churches. Haiti, along with Jamaica and Puerto Rico, is home to one of the fastest growing Pentecostal populations in the Caribbean. As I watch th…

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