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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…

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…

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…

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…

HitchBot Meets His Maker: What a Robot’s Murder Tells Us About Ourselves

By Michael Schulson

…ago, the Canadian-built hitchBOT left Marblehead, Massachusetts. The goal: San Francisco. It was supposed to be an On the Road-meets-Wall-E jaunt, and a testament to the goodwill of human beings. Instead, over the weekend, somebody in Philadelphia destroyed hitchBOT. Game over. The timing for hitchBOT’s destruction felt oddly appropriate. Late last week, the New York Times published a startling article about Xiaoice, a Microsoft chatbot that’s gai…

A Life After Death Double-Feature: Eastwood’s Hereafter and Noe’s Enter the Void

By Jay Michaelson

…hereas the characters in Hereafter live in upper-class Paris, middle-class San Francisco, and the most caring and engaged child welfare system the world has ever known. But the differences are more than skin-deep, especially when it comes to religion. Hereafter goes out of its way to demean traditional religion (and esoteric nonsense) en route to its reluctant affirmation of the afterlife—if the film were a person, she’d be “spiritual, not religio…

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…

“Ex-Gay” Therapy Revealed in Prop. 8 Trial

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…to change.” Those are the words Ryan Kendall uttered in a federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday as the trial over whether or not to overturn Proposition 8 that stripped gays and lesbians of their right to marry in California, got into its second week. Kendall took the stand to recount his harsh treatment in an “ex-gay ministry.” His deeply religious parents forced him into so-called “reparative therapy” after finding a note that Kendall had…

A Brief History of Olympic Flames

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…nd probably always will be. The famous 2nd-century Roman travel writer, Pausanias, reported that the desiccated corpse of an armored hoplite was found in the rafters of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia when it was re-roofed, indicating that there were actually pitched battles waged inside the sanctuary in antiquity. The modern Olympics have also often been sucked into that same vortex, wittingly or no, in the short 108-year compass of their history….

God TV: Televangelism 2.0

By Sarah Posner

…s of the media and the entertainment industry.” And she warned the city of San Francisco, “overwhelm[ed]” by “the weight of sin,” that it would be “brought to your knees.” With their headquarters now in Jerusalem, God TV liberally draws on the trend in both the Word of Faith and apostolic and prophetic movements of “getting back to your Jewish roots.” The increasing embrace of Hebraic Christianity is often described as a desire to grasp the theolo…