A President “Anointed By God”: POTUS Shield and Religious Right’s Affair with Trump
People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch this month published an important report by…
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Like Azusa Street Baptized into Bureaucracy: Mexico’s Flourishing LLDM Church Loses its Apostle
Last Sunday evening, December 7, a plump pastor named Lee Minemann interrupted services in the…
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Why Did So Many Black Women Die? Jonestown at 35
Why did this ultimately tragic movement, led by a young white man, appeal to so many African-American women?
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Denzel’s Profane Preaching: A Religious Movie for the Rest of Us
Flight, like most of the other religiously-themed scripts to which Washington agrees to lend his star power, is no Kirk Cameron morality play. As in The Book of Eli, in which Washington played a post-apocalyptic loner who creates a trail of gore during a violent spiritual pursuit of the lone remaining copy of the Bible, the celluloid preaching in Flight is rated R. In addition to the early lingering shots of full-frontal and rear nudity, the film provides a steady stream of f-bombs, and from nearly start to finish it is awash in booze.
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Rick Perry’s Jesus Imperative: A Report from Saturday’s Mega-Rally
The people who gathered at Reliant Stadium are not just Rick Perry’s spiritual army, raised up, as Perry and others imagine it, in the spirit of Joel 2 to sound an alarm and prepare the people for Judgment Day. They are the ground troops the religious right set out four decades ago to create, and duplicate over generations, for the ongoing culture wars.
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City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala City
In his new book, Kevin O’Neill describes the ways in which Christianity and citizenship, generally considered to be distinct, are melding in Guatemala.
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Pentecostal Scholars Call for Academic Freedom
A scholar of Pentecostalism tells how an academic conference became a culture war battleground, and what she plans to do about it.
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Oral Roberts, Pioneering Christian Zionist
Famous for his use of TV to spread the message, Oral Roberts—friend of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion—helped to popularize the notion that the newly founded State of Israel was an indication that God still acts in history and that events prophesied in the bible were at hand.
Read MoreSarah Palin: Bus Tour of Destruction
By the time this book tour is finished, she will have succeeded in splitting the republican party, solidifying a new hard right religious base, and making enough money to turn Alaska into the New Jerusalem.
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Prosperity, Spiritual Warfare, and the “On-Demand” God
Given that so many powerful Pentecostals and Charismatics, like Senator John Ensign and Sarah Palin, are embroiled in high-profile scandals, one might expect to hear more about the movements that unite them. Anthea Butler, a leading scholar on Pentecostalism and American religious history, traces the various movements and their theologies of wealth, healing, and dominion.
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