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CUFI Entices Donors for Israel with Christmas Ornament

By Sarah Posner

Christians United for Israel, the apocalyptic advocacy group founded by San Antonio televangelist John Hagee, has just announced a generous donor who offered to match donations of up to $500,000, to help it raise a million dollars by the end of the year. CUFI has always maintained — despite all evidence to the contrary — that it is primarily motivated by concern for Israel and the Jews, not by Hagee’s apocalyptic vision for the return of Jesus at…

2010: A Banner Year for Biblical Patriarchy

By Julie Ingersoll

…tes of hell will not prevail” against it. Celebrating the success of their San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival, they reveled in the fact that their keynote speaker’s Christian films are now available at Wal-Mart and that TV and Christian movie star Kirk Cameron joined them as a featured speaker: “Our movement is maturing, God is blessing the work of principled filmmaking.” Encouraging men to form “godly and devoted friendships,” (later…

Controversial “Bishop of the Poor” Dies at 86

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…udying at the Gregorian University in Rome, Bishop Ruiz led the Diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas from 1959 to 2000. In the 1990s he served as mediator in an attempt to end the conflict between the Mexican government and the indigenous Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas. Though he was asked to step down as mediator for supposedly favoring the Zapatistas, the tentative truce between the two groups has been sustained since 1998. He is…

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…

Rehabilitating McCarthy: Doug Phillips’ Festival Award

By Julie Ingersoll

…ligious right in the tea party, Christian Reconstructionist Doug Phillip’s San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival gave its Jubilee Award to a film entitled Agenda: Grinding America Down; watch the trailer and you’ll find all the major talking points of the tea partiers. Even the spokespersons interviewed in the film represent the demographics of the tea party: over 50, almost entirely white and overwhelmingly male. If, like many, you have…

Judgment Day is Coming; Wear Clean Underwear

By Lauri Lebo

…the World won’t be for another six months, according to Harold Camping, a San Francisco-area radio host and the owner of Family Radio. His web site, wecanknow.com, says that Oct. 21 will be the day “when He will destroy the world and all that is therein.” Camping’s followers around the country have been promoting the big day by putting up billboards and driving vehicles with placards. But this is not the first time Camping has predicted Judgment…

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…

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…

Isaac Asimov’s Niece Covers the Rapture

By Lauri Lebo

It’s fitting that Nanette Asimov, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and Isaac Asimov’s niece, covered the failing of the Rapture for her newspaper. She details the story of a man who drove across the country with his family from Maryland to celebrate the event in the empty parking lot of the Family Radio station in Oakland, California, where this whole ridiculousness began. There is no gloating, or smugness in Asimov’s words, only a simple recou…

Lesbian Nuns: Still Immodest After All These Years

By Susan Henking

…the vantage point of her retirement from Wesleyan as Professor Emerita. Susan Henking: As you know, I teach your 1986 book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy and am amazed that the 25th anniversary of its publication is already upon us. In some ways, given that you were writing about the 17th century, 25 years is just a moment. Yet, much has changed in our views of sex and sexuality in the intervening decades. How does…