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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…

By the Way: Fractured Religious Right Endorses McCain

By Randall Balmer

…ition and Focus on the Family, and Jim Garlow, pastor of Skyline Church in San Diego. Also present were Rick Scarborough, founder and president of Vision America, and David Barton, president of WallBuilders; both men have fashioned entire careers out of their denials that the founders ever intended church and state to be separate entities. The meeting (as reported on the website) contained more than the usual over-the-top Religious Right rhetoric…

GOP “Stealthcare” Bill Reveals Catholic Bishops’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…ough the Senate as potentially devastating to many vulnerable populations. San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy called it a “breathtaking” assault on Catholic social teaching that will “deliberately fall apart in the coming years from market forces and ever smaller amounts of government revenue.” Montana Bishop George Thomas warned of “potentially catastrophic effects” on the lives of “children and the elderly, the seriously ill, the immigrant and the…

A Monumentally Different Kirk Cameron

By Julie Ingersoll

…nything but. Cameron recently returned from the Reconstructionist-inspired San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival (SAICFF) hosted by Doug Phillips and Vision Forum (I wrote about SAICFF and his previous participation here and here) where he and Phillips discussed the theological background to the version of American history presented in the film, showing the subtle influence of Christian Reconstructionism and R.J. Rushdoony’s Biblical Phi…

The Higher the Dome, The Closer to God: “Megachurches” Explores the Arid Architecture of America’s New Sanctuaries

By Anita Little

…I don’t know yet if I’m going to do that. We’ll see. I just came back from San Jose where I photographed 15 megachurches there. Do you have any cities of interest that you’d feel most compelled to go to? Well, Texas has a huge amount of megachurches. That’s like the biggest state for megachurches and would be an interesting addition to the project. But I’m not really sure of where I would go. One of your megachurch “megazines” is on view at a gall…

Chatting with Myanmar’s Buddhist “Terrorist”

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…h Gnanasara, but insisted that their agendas were separate. Nonetheless, a number of news reports claim that Wirathu’s 969 and Gnanasaara’s BBS movements are in league, and there are reports that Wirathu has been in contact with Buddhist monks from Thailand’s southern border with Malaysia, where pitched battles have been taking place between Buddhists and the Muslim majority in that locale. Wirathu said it wasn’t just Buddhists who were concerned…

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…

Is Football a Pro-Life Sport?

By Marian Ronan

…taining long-term brain injuries if he continued playing. On May 2, former San Diego Charger’s linebacker Junior Seau died in a suicide strongly resembling the 2011 suicide of former Chicago Bear’s safety Dave Duerson. Duerson intentionally shot himself in the chest, not the head, so his brain could be examined for a degenerative disease he feared he had contracted from multiple concussions. Subsequently he and twenty other former NFL players were…

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…

Are We Living Through World War III?

By Haroon Moghul

…that this was primarily, or exclusively, politically-motivated violence. A number of commentators seem to believe Mateen was struggling with his own sexuality. But Cohen does not hesitate to assign Mateen to larger, world-historical forces: Islam is in epochal crisis. Its Sunni and Shiite branches are mired in violent confrontation. Its adjustment to the modern world has proved faltering and agonized enough to produce a metastasizing strain of vio…