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War on Christmas Affirmed by Southern Baptist Convention

By Mark Gstohl

…de-secularize Christmas they should practice the teachings of Christ and reflect on whether or not they are truly restoring Christmas to its proper place in their lives. Has Christmas become an excuse for excessive consumption? How much time does one spend in reflection on the incarnation versus the time spent contemplating gift lists and shopping? I think the best method for addressing the secularization of Christmas might be to focus on one’s ow…

A Religious History of American Neuroscience

By Leigh Eric Schmidt

…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…

Aliens To Arrive in Alabama Today!

By Ben Brazil

…bsite from which he claimed to get his information. He pulled out his cell phone: “Freddie!” he said to an unseen interlocutor. “Will you find me what that website for the saucer, the prophecy, for tomorrow night – the 14th?” He paused, then yelled: “THE SAUCER! All I want is access to the information so I can give it to someone else.” He then recited the web address of a YouTube video. It was my own searches, however, that turned up Goodchild’s w…

Friending Pope Benedict on Facebook?

By Kate Childs Graham

…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…

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

By LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant

…pression—most notably slavery. After sharing this information I opened the floor to students so that they could offer their perspectives about the relationship between religion and race, but more so, how religious ideology has been used to justify racial hierarchies. Several of my students noted that after the election results, their classmates had made comments such as “they [African Americans] can never complain anymore because they got one of t…

Battling for the Soul of the Democratic Party

By Sarah Posner

…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…

An Immigrant’s Tale: The Pull of the Homeland

By Shabana Mir

…not-religion so very clearly and abruptly. We didn’t have to change in the phone booth, as it were, into the non-religious as we transitioned abruptly from ritual to rat race. It was not so very problematic for one to bleed over into the other. And during Ramadan, we grew up to expect lighter workloads. Migrant workers in certain Gulf countries learned to expect total lack of productivity and sometimes a complete absence of office workers during R…

Religion at Decade’s End

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…port, and music, and film. What seems to me to require further critical reflection in the wake of a year’s ending and a new decade’s imminent arrival, are some especially salient contemporary problems. Some of these are older than others, but they are all decidedly modern: the crisis in global capital (which still seems to me the singular crisis of the past decade); and the uninspiring forms of industrial warfare still alive and none-too-well in…

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

By Matt Recla

…us figure in the eyes of many people. Still, he remains a person of some influence, an individual who ran for president, whose words still garner attention, and whose views reflect a strand of thought within Christendom. Of course, conservatives see the PR disaster in not distancing themselves from Robertson—that’s why many of them have. Yet there isn’t, and probably couldn’t be, a push to drive Robertson off the airwaves. Robertson’s empire will…

Angry Voters, Right-Wing Populism, & Racial Violence: People of Faith Can Help Break the Linkages

By Chip Berlet

…e supremacist movements.” I catch up with the Rev. David Ostendorf by cell phone while he is waiting for a plane at an East Coast airport. He is the executive director of the CNC where Ward works. Ostendorf, A United Church of Christ minister, once led PrairieFire Rural Action, a group that tried to save family farms during a major agricultural economic crisis in the 1980s. “Back then we helped build a popular economic political movement among fam…