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The Nation of Islam at the End of the Apocalyptic Age?

By Anna Clark

…nd the Nation is waning, which he attributes to Farrakhan’s illness; the 75-year-old leader was diagnosed with prostate cancer more than a year ago. While he made what was then called his last public speech at last year’s Saviour’s Day convention, Farrakhan has made appearances since and looked healthy. Magida also believes that the Nation’s influence is waning as black nationalism is waning, “at least the kind the Nation of Islam represents… “The…

6 Reservations About U.S. Intervention in Libya

By Haroon Moghul

…an American road, since it’s so hard to get those paved these days. The United States was able to eliminate Libyan air defense systems in days, and this wasn’t even a full-scale war. Qaddafi has been revealed to be as impotent as Saddam, with an army that can be picked off as so many inert targets in a videogame you have a cheat code for. I’m sure many Arabs and Muslims across the region watched this and thought two things: what exactly was the…

Prison Religion: Rehabilitation or Forced Conversion?

By Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

…the case argued that a residential program that advertises itself as “Bible-based” and “Christ-centered,” and requires prisoners to memorize Bible passages and learn to apply them to their lives, violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The judge agreed, describing the program, InnerChange Freedom Initiative, as a state-sponsored program of forced conversion. The book presents the testimony of the witnesses…

American Indians Irate over Bin Laden Code Name “Geronimo”

By Johnny P. Flynn

…ng from the mountains of the Afghan/Pakistan border. It’s safe to say the United States military hasn’t learned much over the generations about how to fight a war against a well-entrenched band of locals who know the country, and the conflation of Geronimo with bin Laden once again illustrates the failure of the United States to consider its own history in fighting insurgent wars. So what’s the lesson here? Redskins, savages, braves, warriors, a…

A Devil’s Dozen of the Best ‘New Religion Journalism’ Books of the Decade

By Ed Simon

…the United States the vast majority of our medical resources go towards end-of-life care, using medicine, the law, philosophy, ethics, and religion as lenses through which she helps her reader understand difficult questions about what death is, how death should happen, and how death shouldn’t. The Good Death has as a central sentiment that “Because of medical developments, we’ve gotten away from caring for our dying, from seeing death up close… [s…

Democrats Look to Conservative Evangelicals on Immigration

By Sarah Posner

…group that supports the UAFA, there are 36,000 bi-national couples in the United States—same-sex couples in which one is a US citizen and the other faces possible deportation if a partner or spouse cannot sponsor them for citizenship—and about half of those couples have children. In other words, while heterosexuals currently can sponsor their undocumented spouses for citizenship, thousands of gay and lesbian couples face the possibility of their…

United By Hate for Proposition 8

By Jonathan L. Walton

…that enough minority voters will view this amendment for what it is, state-sanctioned discrimination and a bible-based prohibition against exogamy, which is reminiscent of previous state bans on interracial marriage that defined America’s not too distant past. This is why I pray that a solid number of black and brown voters embrace Jesus’ ethic of reciprocity on Tuesday. In other words, the Golden Rule: “Do unto others, as you would have them to…

The Dark Side of Our Obsession With Trapped Thai Children

By Edward E. Curtis IV

…ne of these tragedies; we created the other one. The media offers us minute-by-minute updates about how the Thai children, in a race against time, might escape tragedy. Television viewers tune out of their local and day-to-day problems and tune in to the media coverage. What are the current oxygen levels in the cave? How many countries have joined the effort to save them? Are the boys capable of learning how to use scuba equipment before their tim…

The British (Bible) Invasion: KJV 400-Year Anniversary Rolls On

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…hough there are precious few hangers-on these days, and “the choir can outnumber the congregation.” The whole idea—God, Genesis, Christ, Resurrection—is now to me a moving metaphor, a poetic way of attempting to understand what may be forever incomprehensible. So the six-year-old steeped in the rhythms of the KJV grew up, but he did not grow away. He clearly loves the Book, with a winsome blend of nostalgia for a bygone era and a lyrical love of…

The Return of Christian Terrorism

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…his former students Bahnsen and Rousas John Rushdoony, and Rushdoony’s son-in-law, Gary North) adopted this “presuppositionalism” as a doctrine, with all its implications for the role of religion in political life. Recapturing Institutions for Jesus Reconstruction writers regard the history of Protestant politics since the early years of the Reformation as having taken a bad turn, and they are especially unhappy with the Enlightenment formulation…