By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…Camelot was a “layover on the way to Vietnam.” Maybe so, maybe not. On June 10, 1963, President Kennedy delivered the commencement speech at American University. In the middle of the Cold War, he laid out his vision for a world at peace and how we might get there: “Some say it is useless to speak of peace or world disarmament, and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I bel…
…or a Suburban. Yet McCain supplies no wake-up call, no re-awakening of his spirit to explicate his substitution of Sunday affections. He offers no specifications of the kind of Christ that pressed him from a the Book of Common Prayer to the Baptist Faith and Message. Nor, as mentioned above, has he shown the increased piety of the convert. When asked how often he attends church McCain says, “not as often as I should.” When asked whether he has par…
…vered in Egypt in 1945, was first published in English by James Robinson in 1977, with a paperback version appearing in 1981. Public awareness about the Nag Hammadi materials grew consistently in the following two decades, but exploded in 2003 with the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which, more than anything, showcases Brown’s muddled if provocative incorporation of the Gnostic worldview into the novel. Fans of The Da Vinci Code don’…
…rch is where David Brickner, the founder of Jews for Jesus, spoke on August 17, with Palin in the pews [see audio]. He told congregants that Palestinian attacks on Israelis were God’s “judgement” of Jews for their refusal to embrace Jesus Christ: “Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. When a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, kill…
…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…
…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…
…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…
…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…
…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…
…. 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…
