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Does Dana Milbank have “Mo-Dar”? Or Does He Read RD?

By Joanna Brooks

…columnist Dana Milbank has been everywhere from the Huffington Post to NPR using a titillating tale of Glenn Beck and an old Mormon prophecy about the US Constitution “hanging by a thread” to promote his new book. At HuffPo, Milbank made the dramatic (if overstated) claim that Beck was using the nineteenth-century “White Horse Prophecy” to send a “coded message to the nation’s six million Mormons.” But how did Dana Milkbank decode the secret coded…

Tea Party Bullies on Homosexuality: “No Punishment Too Severe?”

By Julie Ingersoll

…ny punishment as too severe…” Barton is not advocating stoning either, but using an old document to endorse the idea that no punishment is too severe; without actually proposing a punishment, he leaves his listeners to conclude that whatever “punishment” they have in mind would be warranted. These are not the views of an obscure theologian, but are the views of influential players in contemporary politics. Barton has been central to the rise of Gl…

As Gays More Accepted, Religious Opponents More Vocal

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…nion as dramatically as support for gay and lesbian rights. Since 1994 the numbers really pop off the charts over a 20-year period. These trends occur across all religious communities. So the white evangelical fundamentalists today are far more accommodating to gays and lesbians than they were twenty years ago. So are Catholics and mainline Protestants.” Despite that growing accommodation, some more conservative religious leaders—especially those…

Does Liberal Theology Profane God?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…fanity warning label off the album cover and don my enormous brown Koss earphones (that today would look as though I were at the shooting range or on a flight deck) to even listen to the album for fear that my mother would know that I was even listening to such language. But, as Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler, Jr. rightly pointed out in a recent interview, when we’re forbidden in the Ten Commandments from taking God’…

Religious Right: God Should Kill Health Care Reform to Save America from Herod

By Sarah Posner

…its bill that’s controversial even to progressives, the religious right is using new Christmas-themed rhetoric to rally the base to oppose it. Big supporters of the Stupak amendment on the House side, the religious right was up in arms when the Senate version, the Nelson-Hatch amendment, was defeated last week. Even though the religious right claims many reasons for opposing health care reform, including “rationing” and the much dreaded march of s…

Art for Peace: An Interview with Artist Mary Button

By John Shorb

…gh, I felt like I was speaking from this very particular place and that by using my photographs of the peace march, and the tree planting, I could make paintings that were personal, but also a document of a very special experience. What was your overall motivation in this series? I wanted to convey this overwhelming and emphatic love that I saw while I was at the peace summit. I was challenged to think very seriously about what faith means and wor…

RDBook: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World: An Interview with Michelle Goldberg

By Mandy Van Deven

…al identity, my gender identity.” At the same time, others will argue that using more neutral terms like “female genital cutting” or “female circumcision” downplays the horrors of the practice, and implies a kind of relativism. The fact that the terms are so loaded underscores how polarized the debate is—it’s really hard to discuss something if you can’t even agree on what to call it. “Female feticide” is a little different. Almost everyone in Ind…

Julian Assange Nativity, Castro’s Hanukkah, & a Burger Blessing

By Michael J. Altman

…ent Obama re-evaluating his campaign stance against gay marriage? PETA is using the pope’s recent condom comments to remind everyone that “Dogs & Cats Can’t Use Condoms” and so they ought to be spayed or neutered. China will choose its own leaders for its government-backed Catholic Church despite opposition from the Vatican. A Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and a Buddhist priest blessed a hamburger… and there’s no punchline, they just blessed t…

Confronting and Participating in Crass Christmas Commercialism

By Lerone A. Martin

…example of the timeless dilemma producers of religious commodities face in using the marketplace to remind the nation that “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Gates, who died in 1945, gained popularity by using the phonograph and music industry to record, transmit, and sell his sermons across the country. “Getting Ready for Christmas Day” was the preacher’s last recorded sermon in a corpus of over two hundred. American clergy such as Gates, have…

Palin’s Prayer Shield

By Anthea Butler

…rom all attacks from the devil or satanic forces, based on Ephesians 6:16. Using the term “prayer shield” is a signal to her followers to continue to pray for her, and much like Mike Huckabee’s prayer request, serves to rally the followers around the “anointed one.” The upshot of the interview is that Palin can still be a good Christian woman, all the while asking her supporters to both pray and mobilize on her behalf, because God is calling her “…