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Like Azusa Street Baptized into Bureaucracy: Mexico’s Flourishing LLDM Church Loses its Apostle

By Michael Schulson

…consists of one family; on Saturdays, they sell roast chicken from a food cart in order to pay the rent on their storefront chapel) sang, prayed, kneeled, and stood in concert with their brethren in Guadalajara—and in North Carolina, presumably, and in California, and in hundreds of other places as well. Samuel Joaquín’s insight, perhaps, was that his church didn’t need to remain a close-knit community, bound by enforced norms and geographical pr…

I Was Nearly Seduced by David Brooks’ Reasonable Analysis

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…inant models of analysis: number crunching and psychology. Greenspan was a number cruncher, says Brooks, and unfortunately, human psychology caught up with him. Greenspan saw real estate values continuing to soar with no end in sight and allowed himself to be persuaded that they would never stop rising, and certainly would never fall. So he never had to think about petty psychological realities, like a crisis of confidence, never mind an actual pa…

Even After an Obama Victory Reports of the Death of the Religious Right are Greatly Exaggerated

By Bill Berkowitz

…uing a host of Obama missteps including complaints about the reversal of a number of Bush administration executive orders. Conservative evangelical leaders will engage in a spirited and steadfast attempt to rebuild and reinvigorate a wounded movement, leading to the US Postal Service and direct-mail companies experiencing a surge in business as urgent fundraising appeals pepper the mailboxes and inboxes of religious right supporters. At its worst—…

RD News Round-Up—Nov. 4, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…ach to a system-wide epidemic of rising medical costs, disparate levels of care and growing numbers of uninsured or underinsured Americans,” the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy recently reported. “You’re describing the perfect storm,” Neil Calman, CEO of the Bronx, New York-based Institute for Family Health, a speaker at the event, responded to an audience member’s comment: “People are going to find the situation will get increasi…

Mormons Fight Marriage Equality in Mexico; Is Catholic Church Italy’s Anti-Gay NRA?; Nigerian Anglicans Cut Ties With UK Diocese; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…“the primary idea of the traditional family, the church played all of its cards to influence Italian politics, even through today.” Civil unions passed, but gay adoption — adamantly opposed by church leaders — was stripped from the legislation. Giovanni Dall’Orto, a gay historian in Milan, analyzed this dynamic more bluntly. “Consider the Catholic Church our N.R.A.,” he told me. Nigeria: Anglican church cuts ties with UK diocese; broadcasters get…

Ten of Our Favorite Top Tens

By The Editors

…ists. From the Ten Commandments, to the ten avatars of Vishnu (Krishna was number eight), to Buddhism’s ten precepts, religions are all about systems, ethical prescriptions—or proscriptions—and grand schemes. Order out of chaos is the name of the game. All this to suggest that the Top Ten list is obviously something deeply ingrained in the human experience. So here, without further preamble, RD’s picks for the Ten Best of 2008’s Religion Top Ten l…

Women’s Liberation Through Submission: An Evangelical Anti-Feminism Is Born

By Kathryn Joyce

…o, like those men of old, know what to do.” DeMoss has collaborated with a number of her fellow speakers before. In 2002, she edited a compilation of essays on submission and headship entitled Biblical Womanhood in the Home, which drew contributions from Kassian, Hunt, and other complementarian matriarchs, such as Dorothy Kelley Patterson, who with her husband, Paige Patterson, created the homemaking degree and curriculum introduced at Southwester…

Amway, Religious Right Pyramid Scheme, Returns to the Motherland

By Bill Berkowitz

…t would only end up endangering the lives of American citizens: We must be careful not to blame innocent Americans for murderous attacks against them. At the same time, let’s acknowledge that America’s increasing decadence is giving aid and comfort to the enemy… Radical Islamists were surely watching in July when the Senate voted on procedural grounds to do away with the Federal Marriage Amendment. This is like handing moral weapons of mass destru…

The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

By Michelle Lelwica

…erienced post-surgery? This apparent contradiction forced me to think more carefully about what it is about mainstream approaches to a “better body” that I find problematic. Essentially, Shameful Bodies targets a specific storyline about physical improvement: one that serves the interests of global capitalism; one whose iconography creates a hierarchy of bodies that reinforce social inequities; one whose moral codes and body norms foster judgment…

What Irish Marriage Vote Means for Catholic Church; The Lonely Fight for Equality in Belize; Progress and Backlash in Tunisia; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…at for Christian principles but also a “defeat for humanity.” Conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke said Irish voters are worse than pagans: Cardinal Raymond Burke, who was recently moved from a senior role in the Vatican to be patron of the Order of Malta, told the Newman Society, Oxford University’s Catholic Society, last night that he struggled to understand “any nation redefining marriage”. Visibly moved, he went on: “I mean, this is a defiance…