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Polygamy Bus Tour, ‘Spiritual’ Healthcare for Christian Scientists, Baptizing an Alien…

By Michael J. Altman

…alls the Park51 project a “victory mosque” and compares it to mosques in Jerusalem and Constantinople. Disneyland designed its own headscarf for a Muslim employee. Religious groups have entered both sides of the debate over whether the state of Virginia should privatize its alcohol sales and dissolve the ABC. Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, is for it but the Virginia Assembly of Independent Baptists and the Virgina Interfaith C…

Santorum and the New Catholic-Evangelical Alliance

By Sarah Posner

…on onto Meet the Press and to CNN. He’s preached it in USA Today and inThe New York Times. More famously, he has brought into Catholicism several members of the conservative elite. McCloskey personally baptized Judge Robert Bork, political pundits Robert Novak and Lawrence Kudlow, publisher Alfred Regnery, financier Lewis Lehrman, and US Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, whose baptismal sponsor was another senator, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. In…

Good News Bad News

By Amina Wadud

…han the idea of gender as an arena of discourse, or part of identity, is a new. Sure, lots of people want to return us to the old patriarchal constructions of the past—but then that is not progress, is it? How far we can progress and at the same time claim Islam, respect its traditions, is really the nuts and bolts of the discourse about progressive Islam. It is important for my sanity to have places where this conversation can go on at a somewhat…

The Resurgence of Right-Wing Anti-Semitic Conspiracism Endangers All Justice Movements

By Ben Lorber

…rings were Jewish, with Democratic Congressman John E. Rankin framing the crusade as a battle between “Yiddish communism versus Christian civilization.” During the 1950s, movements for civil rights and immigration reform were quickly painted as Communist conspiracies by far-right conservatives like George Wallace and the John Birch Society. White supremacist groups like the KKK and the Christian Identity movement went a step further, claiming that…

Trump’s Bibles and Sneakers Campaigns Tell an Old Story About the Role of Race in Christian Nationalism

By Dara Delgado

…ne they referred to internally as the “money bomb” which, according to the New York Times, “steered supporters into unwitting donations.” In March of this year, just days before Easter, Donald Trump held a press conference to announce the sale of his new Bible. For $59.99, Americans wishing to join the former president in “Making America Pray Again” could own what he claimed to be his “favorite book.” The God Bless the USA Bible (GBUSA), the only…

McCain’s VP Courts Conservative Evangelicals

By Kathryn Joyce

…s to their husbands’, fathers’ and pastors’ authority. She also employed a word usage common among profamily pronatalists who encourage large families, referring to her children as “blessings” in the same way that women of the Quiverfull conviction call every pregnancy a blessing. The Christian Coalition of America seemed to highlight Palin’s motherhood and “servant’s heart” in their celebration of the nomination, noting Palin’s promise to her Ala…

Sean Feucht’s New Year’s Rockin’ Superspreader Revival is a ‘Tepid and Meager’ Effort at Racial Reconciliation

By Isaiah Murtaugh

…d-induced restrictions on worship, a move critics say is to excuse blatant rule-breaking and obscure the real purpose of the events. And while courts have given credibility to aspects of Feucht’s argument—most notably in a series of recent Supreme Court decisions in favor of houses of worship opposed to local restrictions—Feucht himself seems to have a higher calling in mind: religious revival. His personal website sells “Revival or Bust” T-shirts…

Where Do “Sacred” Values Live in the Brain?

By Arri Eisen

…g thinking, these same parts of the brain have been implicated in language rule and other rule retrieval. The researchers also found that sacred values thinking activated the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain. Perhaps not too much surprise there. Why does any of this matter? It goes back to why we believe what we do; the military strategists, the politicians. People make decisions—and act—based on their beliefs. The more we understand ab…

Was George W. Bush the Last Hippie?

By David R. Williams

…permission, but I was glad to pay every cent. I sent a review copy to The New Yorker’s Louis Menand who had reviewed my earlier book Sin Boldly! He sent me back an email thanking me for the book and praising the cover. That was it. I am still waiting for a review. Is there a book you wish you had written? Why? Call it a cliché, but my field is early American, and still the greatest book in the world to me, one I reread every year and still get mo…

What if Israel Were in Germany? An Alternate History

By Haroon Moghul

…mes superfluous. In The Mirage, 9/11 is actually 11/9, the day when Texan Crusaders slammed airliners into Baghdad skyscrapers, sparking a war on terror that rages across a nearly unrecognizable North America, where LBJ has run the U.S. since Kennedy died, the Mormons rule an independent Missouri monarchy, the heartland is another country altogether, and the Rockies are better left alone, a series of war-torn tribal homelands producing fierce warr…