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Gandhi, his Grandson, Israel, and the Jews

By Shalom Goldman

…e by peaceful means, not by violence. Gandhi’s opposition to Zionism in the 1920s and ’30s did not preclude support for the rights of Jews in Europe, however. In 1931, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, one of America’s most prominent Reform Rabbis and a leader of the Zionist Organization of America, was invited to address the Friends of Gandhi Dinner in New York City on the occasion of the Mahatma’s Sixty-second birthday. Rabbi Wise, who had long admired Gan…

RD News Round-Up—Oct.14, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…g first-time voters, who make up close to one-third of this age group (ages 18-34), more than seven-in-ten (71%) support Obama, compared to slightly more than half (53%) of young voters who have voted in previous elections. Younger Catholics more strongly support Obama, abortion rights, and more active government than older Catholics. While older Catholics (age 35 and older) are split between the candidates (46% for McCain and 44% for Obama), amon…

A Lone Blogger vs. the McCain-Hagee Alliance

By Bruce Wilson

…ximates the vote-getting heft of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority of the late 1970s and 1980s and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition of the late 1980s and 1990s)—except that CUFI is based around one closely-related raft of goals which, as journalist Max Blumenthal has crisply put it, called for “an expansion of Israel and a unilateral military attack on Iran.” The video, which was more of a collage than a documentary, featured no narrative voice at…

Hagee and McCain Part Ways

By Ira Chernus

…r him was to reject the notion of a God who guides history. Sometime in the 1980s, I was leaving a restaurant with Rubenstein when he said quite casually that the Jewish people had rejected his theological view and they were right to do so. Before I could ask him why they were right, he headed off in another direction and I never saw him again. But he was surely right on one point. As Rabbi David Saperstein noted in the Washington Post (in his own…

God TV: Televangelism 2.0

By Sarah Posner

…ld her He was preparing, “to pour out from heaven the ferocious fire of my spirit” on the West Coast of America—a “fresh new breath upon California” and not, Alec insisted, a mere repeat of the 1906 Azusa Street Revival. She said God promised a “cleansing” of Los Angeles and its “gatekeepers of the media and the entertainment industry.” And she warned the city of San Francisco, “overwhelm[ed]” by “the weight of sin,” that it would be “brought to y…

What’s Wrong with Wright’s Words

By Andrew Murphy

…. These presuppositions were deepened and strengthened by the events of the 1770s and 1780s, in which the notion of an American Israel throwing off oppression in order to take up its national mission settled ever more deeply into American public rhetoric. This link was only strengthened by the Revolutionary experience, the great evangelical revivals of the early nineteenth century, and the nation’s first movements westward. Nor did the jeremiad go…

Protests Force Torch Detour in San Francisco

By Lygia Navarro

…schoolchildren, hippies on bicycles, office workers, and Buddhist monks. At 1:00 p.m., with the torchbearers preparing far across town, police attention turned toward the corner of the plaza where the Torch route was to end. Chinese performers sang Olympic pop promos and protesters waved signs reading “Free Tibet” and “Free Speech Now.” One man shouted, “Protect the First Amendment! This isn’t Communist China!” Police and park rangers tried convin…

Dispatches from the Beltway: Beyond the Graying and Greening Religious Right

By Robert P. Jones

…and right evangelicals on each of these issues. Importantly, more than 8 in 10 in the evangelical left/center want to find middle ground on abortion laws, while 6 in 10 in the evangelical right think there’s no room for compromise on abortion. On gay and lesbian issues, while only a quarter of the left/center evangelicals support allowing gays and lesbians to legally marry, a near majority (49 percent) support allowing gay and lesbian couples to e…

RDPulpit: Rick Warren and the Limits of Empathy

By Tom Davis

…megachurch pastor comes from a long line of Southern Baptist preachers. In 1980 he began the Saddleback Church with a tiny congregation who brought lawn chairs to basement meetings. His obvious talents and experimental programs led the church to grow exponentially. Today it has 22,000 members and operates from a large campus in Lake Forest, California, which includes a middle school and high school with an enrollment of 1500. These accomplishment…

Aliens To Arrive in Alabama Today!

By Ben Brazil

…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…