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Recovering From Rejection: The Second Coming of Ted Haggard

By Wendy Norris

…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…

How Mormonism Built Glenn Beck

By Joanna Brooks

…ly those under 40 who may not remember the anti-Mormon cult crusades of the 1980s) are increasingly willing to set aside their reservations about Mormons when it suits their pragmatic and political interests. Glenn Beck marks an unprecedented national mainstreaming of a peculiar strand of religious political conservatism rooted in, and once isolated to, the Mormon culture regions of the American West. That Mormons are capable of leveraging disprop…

A Letter to the Religious Left on the Victory of Obama

By Daniel Schultz

…eir top four reasons to support Obama. Focusing on economic justice in the spirit of fairness and equal access to opportunity is consistent with Old Testament ethics. It is also likely to be a winner for a renewed Religious Left in that it allows you to play at the heart of a broad coalition. A word of caution, however. The economic agenda endorsed by voters is not identical to Jim Wallis-style poverty relief. We may have entered a new period in A…

Chilean Mine Rescue: Largest Global Spiritual Event Ever?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ion per minute), the rescue of the Chilean miners is the largest expressly spiritual, global, digital event. In a world of spiritual ambiguity and religious indifference, the Copiapó miners’ ascents from the depths of the earth were nothing if not a participatory allegory of the human spirit challenged by the machinery of greed and raised up on the strength of a complex technology whose success seems to have been made possible only by the perfect…

Sex and Civilization: The Body as Battleground

By Jay Michaelson

…ural) is that which curbs what we today might call “nature” in the name of spiritual discipline. Yes, Paul replaces physical circumcision with spiritual, but in doing so he creates a far more insidious apparatus of control. This is a nature of anti-nature. Ironic, then, that many of today’s anti-gay voices call homosexuality “unnatural” in a pseudo-scientific sense. They are wrong; Paul is right. Homosexuality is entirely too natural, found in ove…

First Gay Bishop? Give Me a Break

By Peter Montgomery

…Communion not invited to attend. Both his isolation and his indefatigable spirit are palpable as he chats with folks outside the gate, visits an AIDS charity, and hangs out in a coffee shop, never able to get close enough to his fellow bishops to have the kind of conversations he had hoped for. Director Alston gives plenty of time to other voices; both those allied with Robinson and those who oppose the changes he is asking the church to make. On…

Better Science Through God?

By Nathan Schneider

…atheism, the often-religionist Protscience guerrillas offer to restore the spirit—and the metaphysics—that gave us science in the first place. Then and now, Fuller contends, God the lawgiver/designer/intervener makes a better mascot for good research than any lack thereof that atheism or agnosticism have to offer. In a revealing “Further Reading” section, he cites the accomplishments of his friends at the ID-friendly Discovery Institute unironical…

Why I Am a “Cuomosexual”

By Donna Schaper

…gical statement matters more to the deportee, the down-and-out, and the gay 17-year-old who jumps off a bridge than any horse-trading we could ever do. We still want to be smart about the material while being enchanted by the spiritual. We are not going back to the time when we converted people in the soup kitchen so they could eat (are you saved?) so much as we are going forward toward an opening levered by the Holy Spirit and drawing us more dee…

The Abandoned Orphanage: Hillary Clinton’s Mother Teresa Moment

By Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce

…ving into Clinton’s religious history, we studied her relationships with a number of spiritual mentors, including Tikkun’s Michael Lerner, who was soon replaced by “sacred psychologist” Jean Houston, who famously helped the First Lady get in touch with the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, after Mother Teresa died, Clinton invoked the spirit of the nun as her guiding light so religiously that one might be excused for wondering whether she meant i…

For the Love of God, Bono, Please Stop Touring

By Ben Swihart

…w understanding of activism is mirrored when we refer to a U2 concert as a spiritual experience. I pay my tithe, you mean I have to volunteer too? We hired a children’s pastor, why do I also need to talk about spiritual matters around the dinner table? We have a hospitality ministry, why do I need to be nice to people? Our mission and evangelism committee covers outreach, so surely I don’t need to love my [poor/minority/LGBTQ/etc.] neighbors. The…