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A Catholic Turnabout on Abortion or More Sympathy for the Bishops?

By Daniel C. Maguire

…ns where there are differences, which is the hallmark of clear thought and sanity, you can judge different issues differently. Thomas Aquinas put it simply: “Human actions are right or wrong according to the circumstances.” If the circumstances are different, your moral judgment can be different. And the circumstances of all the cases Steinfels hauls out from his store of non sequiturs are really and crucially different. A judgment on one does not…

Perry To Accuse Obama of Appeasement

By Sarah Posner

…onth, Hagee spoke and brought a sizable contingent of congregants from his San Antonio church. Perry has prayed at Hagee’s church, and agreed with him that non-Christians are doomed to hell. The appeasement accusation is as old as Neville Chamberlain, and deployed with frequency by Christian Zionists to argue that Israel faces a threat as dire as Nazism. Perry wouldn’t be the first Republican to accuse Obama of appeasement; George W. Bush did it i…

Church and State in Mexico: A Political Party Wavers on Women’s Rights

By Ruth Samuelson

…nce 2008, 17 states have passed similar measures—most recently in Baja and San Luis Potosi just last month. The wave of legislation began in reaction to a groundbreaking 2007 Mexico City law allowing abortions in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. But it swelled as PRI leaders, seeking to gain conservative support in the 2009 elections, began forming alliances with local church leaders. Undoubtedly, Mexican politics has become more religiously conse…

Polygamist Warren Jeffs Convicted of Sexual Assault

By Anthea Butler

…5 year-old girls who were “spiritually married” to him. The trial, held in San Angelo, Texas, was short but disturbing, with audiotapes and photographs of Jeffs’ crimes presented to the jury. During the trial, Jeffs fired his defense team, and defended himself with rambling missives and an affidavit he claimed came from God. Often, he just sat in silence. The jury verdict came quickly after hearing particularly sordid testimony, including the test…

Rick Perry’s Jesus Imperative: A Report from Saturday’s Mega-Rally

By Sarah Posner

…the answers. Only the Lord does.” Joyce Thompson, who came to Houston from San Antonio with a friend, echoed a persistent theme to me over breakfast at our hotel: that Christianity is somehow under siege from enemies. Thompson, who described herself as a 66-year-old Tea Partier, tearfully said, “I can’t understand people who want to destroy our country.” When I asked her who those people might be, she replied, “It’s a Muslim thing. It’s Satan agai…

How Breivik’s “Cultural Analysis” is Drawn from the “Christian Worldview”

By Sarah Posner

…nti-communist crusader whose Summit Ministries has been influential to thousands of evangelicals, teaches this cohesive ideology known as the “Christian worldview.” As I wrote last year: Noebel, or “Doc” as his devotees call him, is the doyen of Summit Ministries, the Manitou Springs, Colorado-based institution founded in 1962 to teach evangelical teens about anti-God, anti-Christian threats to the “Christian worldview” and the American way of lif…

How Evangelicals Pick Presidents

By Sarah Posner

…rty; Hagee has made political contributions to Perry and hosted him at his San Antonio church. Sullivan reports that the call in which the support was pledged to Perry took place in early June; that coincides exactly with the timing of Perry’s announcement of his prayerfest, The Response, an event not theologically dissimilar to Perkins’ FRC’s “Call2Fall” this past weekend, at which attendees at churches across the country pledged, “I will answer…

Gingrich and Hagee, End-Times Buddies

By Sarah Posner

…nfolding in the Middle East, Newt Gingrich’s planned visit to John Hagee’s San Antonio church offers a window into how Republican candidates re-tool apocalyptic theology as foreign policy, for mass consumption. The pair have long been fellow travelers; despite Hagee’s history of anti-Catholic statements and Gingrich’s recent conversion to Catholicism, they have both orbited the same nexus of neoconservative foreign policy and apocalyptic biblical…

Facebook Doesn’t Kill Churches, Churches Kill Churches

By Elizabeth Drescher

…s about the more narrow scope of active Facebook affiliations, despite the number of “friends” a person’s profile page might boast. With regard to churches, Beck reads the data as suggesting that Facebook and other social media are replacing what he believes is the “main draw of the traditional church: social connection and affiliation.” It’s an engaging argument. Beck is certainly right that church is no longer a central gathering place for the m…

Republicans Silent on Islamophobia

By Sarah Posner

…on, and is Christian, speak in 2007, at John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in San Antonio. I reported in my book, God’s Profits: Gabriel, author of the book Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America, attempts to draw parallels between her experience in Lebanon and an Islamic threat to American democracy. When Muslims became a majority in Lebanon (“they multiply much more quickly than we do”), [Gabriel claimed] Christians were “att…