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   Religion and Marketing It's a belief-system, it's a political heavyweight, it's a marketing tool. Two weeks ago ComBlu released a new nine-step marketing model called The Evangelist Effect(TM), which relies on "customer evangelism" and Word-of-Mouth testimony. Today Martin Lindstrom, author of Brand Sense:... [ Continue reading: ] Founder Worship The New York Times' conservative beat reporter, David Kirkpatrick, experiences God's Washington, D.C., with David Barton, vice president of the Texas Republican party and point man in the conservative Christian movement to emphasize the importance of Christianity in U.S. history... [ Continue reading: ] Flirt Squad Pious hard-liners in Iran are outraged over alleged public flirtations that occurred in an affluent area of Tehran on the night of Ashura, the most sacred day of mourning in Shiite Islam, which commemorates the death of Iman Hossin. According... [ Continue reading: ] Special Relationship Christian Voice -- the British evangelical group which protested the broadcast of Jerry Spinger: The Opera by releasing the home addresses and phone numbers of BBC executives on the internet, and which later intimidated a small cancer charity into refusing... [ Continue reading: ] Ten Commandments Case "'I didn't sue Christianity or Judaism. I sued the government.'" Thomas Van Orden, the now-homeless Vietnam veteran and former lawyer who brought this Wednesday's Supreme Court case challenging Ten Commandments monuments on public grounds, discusses his upcoming case and his... [ Continue reading: ]  The Faith of a Killer Sharlet: CNN headlines the fact that Dennis Rader, the just-arrested, alleged "BTK" serial killer of Wichita, Kansas, conforms to that classic trope of American gothic horror, the "evil preacher": "BTK suspect was dogcatcher, church leader." Rader wasn't a preacher, but he was the president of the local Christ Lutheran Church. The creepy vibe foregrounded by CNN has antecedents in stories such as Night of the Hunter and contemporary corollaries in the Catholic priest abuse scandal. There's a narrative frisson whenever someone publicly coded as good and honest turns out to be secretly evil and devious. Fox News, however, for once eschews the sensationalism of archetype, so vigorously, in fact, that in its 772-word main report, 100 words longer and otherwise much scarier than CNN's, it doesn't mention Rader's 30-year church affiliation (in a sidebar piece they mention that he was "active in his church," but not that he served as its president). That's probably just as bad for the story, but good for the church, which doesn't deserve to be tarred by Rader's crimes. Surely, such horrors are unrelated to the church's teachings. Or are they? No, I'm not suggesting that the Gospel leads one to murder. Rather, that Rader's life for the last 30 years has contained two powerful moral worldviews, seemingly at odds. Fox deals with that by ignoring Raders' life in the church; CNN deals with it by using it to tie the news to the tradition of b-movie villains. I've written Rader via an email address for him listed on a cached version of the church's website, asking him whether, if he concedes his guilt, his faith and his church life played a role in his crimes, either as a restraining force or, in some twisted fashion, a justifying force. I don't expect an answer, of course, and I'm not going to request an interview through his lawyer. But if this story develops, as I suspect it will, into another entry in the evil preacher subgenre, I hope some reporter will investigate the role of faith, for better or worse, in the mind of the killer. [ Continue reading: ]  The Anglican Not-Divide Reports on the communiqué issued yesterday by Anglican primates have widely misrepresented the news as final proof of an Anglican split, and interpreted a request in the document -- that the Episcopal Church U.S.A. and the Anglican Church of Canada... [ Continue reading: ] Attorney General Demands Women's Medical Records Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, a staunch abortion opponent and former state representative, has demanded the complete medical records of almost 90 women who either had an abortion after 22 weeks of pregnancy (illegal in Kansas except when a woman's... [ Continue reading: ] Mark of the Beast Gets You a Sloppy Joe The plan of a West Virginia school to keep track of students' lunch accounts, when students kept losing their paper lunch cards, by electronically scanning student fingerprints has drawn criticism from a local pastor, who sees the system as well-intentioned,... [ Continue reading: ] Close Your Eyes and Think of Mankind Sisters may be doing it for themselves, but the Alliance Defense Fund says it's doing what it does for the survival of the whole species. How is ADF protecting humanity from extinction today? By fighting gay marriage in San Francisco's... [ Continue reading: ] Child Exorcisms On the five-year anniversary of the death of a British child killed during an attempted exorcism, BBC's Newsnight broadcast an investigation of child exoricisms in African churches in England. Black church and community leaders, from organizations such as Africans Against... [ Continue reading: ]  Simpsons: Godless, Gay, or (Gasp) Both?
New Noonan Peggy Noonan enters the god-blogosphere, kindof, writing her weekly Wall Street Journal column "blog-style," and inviting readers to guess the theme connecting her musings on Hunter Thompson's death ("an occasion for compassion" and "a sense of universal idiocy"); Hillary Clinton's... [ Continue reading: ] Halachic Ruling on Disengagement Rabbi Shaul Bar-Ilan, writing for the Council of Rabbis of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, has issued a halachic opininion, charging that police and soldiers who carry out the evacuation of Jewish settlements will be committing 14 biblical sins,... [ Continue reading: ] Cosmic Therapist A new survey released by the National Study of Youth and Religion (led by UNC sociologist Christian Smith) finds that a majority of American teens believe in God, stick to their parents' faith, and attend worship services on at least... [ Continue reading: ] Scout Appeal A Michigan atheist, John Scalise, is appealing to the Supreme Court to review a ruling that allows Boy Scout recruitment posters inside schools. Scalise argues that the Scouts discriminate against nonreligious boys and parents and the schools are therefore sponsoring... [ Continue reading: ]  Council for National Policy Gadflyer contributor Sarah Posner delivers a thorough investigation of the Council for National Policy (CNP), the little-known but high-powered conservative organization founded by Left Behind author Tim LaHaye in 1981. It's been described by Donald Rumsfeld as "the heart of... [ Continue reading: ] Little White Stones In the second installment of a three-part series on the place of religion in Europe, Peter Ford of The Christian Science Monitor finds "waves of spirituality" in the "secular ocean" that is the continent of Europe. Among these new wave-makers, Ford notes some violent, "noisy" types: radical Muslims who bombed the trains in Madrid and murdered Theo van Gogh, and the "angry mob" of brick-throwing Sikhs who forced the closure of a British play last December. But that's not to worry anyone that the rise of religion is potentially divisive; Ford's also found "signs of a quieter and less divisive return of religion and spirituality to European lives": charmismatic Christian movements in the American tradition, a surge in religion-related publishing, and increased interest in Buddhist meditation. Sound like a familiar divide? [ Continue reading: ] I've Been Sanctified... "'When a young man and a young woman give in to Satan, when they strip down like animals in the wild and prepare themselves for a lusty round of heavy petting and full-blown sex, what better reminder for them to... [ Continue reading: ] Terri Schiavo Case The case of Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged Florida woman at the heart of a fierce battle between her husband and her parents over whether or not her feeding tube should be removed, effectively causing her death by starvation, has... [ Continue reading: ]  Separation of Church and State In the Eye of the Beholder Among the legislation proposed in the Arkansas House of Representatives this session -- prohibiting gay adoption, requiring parental permission for abortion, defining marriage as heterosexual in school textbooks, and creating "In God We Trust" license plates -- was Democratic representative... [ Continue reading: ] Is This Anything? The magic properties of the word "religion" -- simultaneously capable of bestowing protection and destroying credibility -- are shown again in battles to append or strip the label to various groups or theories. In Iowa, state authorities are trying to... [ Continue reading: ] The Education of Senator Thune Sharlet: Daschle defeater John Thune cites spiritual influence of a man who cites spiritual model of Osama Bin Laden. In this Q&A Christianity Today conducted with Senator Thune (R, SD), he says that the "C Street ministry" of Doug Coe... [ Continue reading: ] The President Says So While most of the press gets giddy over the revelation that Bush smoked pot ('cause, y'know, coke is for kids, but weed kills), leave it to the conservative Kathy Shaidle of Relapsed Catholic to note the real significance of the... [ Continue reading: ] The Passion of Constantine Next to Constantine, Mel Gibson's The Passion is an episode of Spongebob Squarepants. In Constantine, Keanu Reeves as the titular, demon-slaying hero visits a bar frequented by the "fallen," the decadence of whom we are to presume from their adrogynous... [ Continue reading: ] Haunted Derrida "For someone constantly accused of relativism, Derrida often sounds in these late works like a man haunted by the absolute. There is a sense in which, although he was an atheist, he practiced what a medieval scholar might have recognized as 'negative theology' -- an effort to define the nature of God by cutting away all the misleading conceptions imposed by the limits of human understanding." Scott McLemee on this past weekend's "Derrida/America" conference, in Inside Higher Ed. [ Continue reading: ]  Gay Cartoons After the dismissal of the "Philadelphia Four" case, America gets back to discussing questions of marriage and gay rights as America best knows how: with animated stand-ins duking the issue out for us. The latest cartoon exploration of same-sex marriage... [ Continue reading: ] Holocaust Metaphors: Still Backfiring After All These Years Things Pope John Paul II could have learned from Democrats or MoveOn.org: It's a short list, but for starters, that Hitler/Nazi/Holocaust analogies tend to be more trouble than they're worth. Paul Spiegel, president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, and... [ Continue reading: ] Prayers for Conviction Virginia lawmakers, who are currently reviewing a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would secure the right to public prayer in schools and other municipal buildings, were angered last Friday by the public prayer of Rev. Debra Peevey, the... [ Continue reading: ] In Defense of Libraries By Ben Daniel: On January 28th, Freedom House, an organization that monitors human rights and promotes democracy and American-style freedoms worldwide released a report entitled "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fills American Mosques," detailing the presence of Saudi-funded tracts that advocate a strict Wahabi Islam and denounce all things Western, with particularly strong condemnations of Christians, Jews, moderate Muslims, and women who dare to consider themselves human. It is clear from reading the report that Freedom House sees the content of libraries in American mosques as a potential battleground in the war on terror. [ Continue reading: ] Hunter S. Thompson, Revelator Hunter S. Thompson shot himself yesterday. Thompson was not a religion writer, but he was surely a religious one. He put his faith in the explosive power of revelation and set about dynamiting all that he found unholy, most of which tended to be that which the rest of the world found very holy, indeed. He was, in his way, a pious writer, dedicated without compromise to chronicling the unending jihad between American myth and American corruption. He relied on what new agers might call "spiritual guides," cut-rate Virgils such as Oscar Zeta Acosta, the "Brown Buffalo." And he wrote like the Bible's last John, exiled to Patmos, dreaming of apocalypse and rambling on in feverish prose meant to suggest the end of the world through sanctified hyperbole. There were precedents for his work, but not in the last couple millenia. And his imitators are legion, and awful. His legacy is a generation of vipers, nasty little would-be gonzos lacking not only the wit but also the less-noticed moral fever with which his best writing sliced arteries. No one should try to write like Hunter Thompson. But every journalist -- especially those of us mucking around in the intangible swamp of "religion" -- ought to read him. He wrote American scripture. In 2000, The Paris Review interviewed Thompson. "Almost without exception," the journal noted, "writers we’ve interviewed over the years admit they cannot write under the influence of booze or drugs–or at the least what they’ve done has to be rewritten in the cool of the day. What’s your comment about this?" Thompson's reply: "They lie... Did you interview Coleridge? Did you interview Poe? Or Scott Fitzgerald? Or Mark Twain? Or Fred Exley? Did Faulkner tell you that what he was drinking all the time was really iced tea, not whiskey? Please. Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation?" [ Continue reading: ]  Remember No Evil Disappearances, torture and nun-killings. How's the media to make use of historical context when history itself seems stuck on repeat? Not a week after the murder of an American nun who spent her life working to defend Brazilian peasants against... [ Continue reading: ] What's That Over There? For anyone sad to see the "Philadelphia Four" story fade away, there's more outrage and free speech debates to be had at the University of Arizona, where "traveling evangelist" Jed Smock has been agitating liberals and embarrassing campus Christians all... [ Continue reading: ] Ecological Sin To mark the Kyoto Protocol, which took effect in the rest of the world this week, the National Council of Churches issued an open letter, attempting to refute "false gospel" about the environment and urging American Christians to repent "ecological... [ Continue reading: ] What Becomes of the Almost-Martyrs? Pennsylvania judge Pamela Dembe has dismissed all charges -- inciting riot, conspiracy and ethnic intimidation (Pennsylvania's hate crime law) -- brought against the four conservative Christian protesters arrested last fall for picketing a gay street festival with a bullhorn and... [ Continue reading: ] More Stickers Science class update: Wyatt Bunker, a Memphis school board member who helped establish Bible classes in county schools is pushing to add stickers to biology textbooks with the disclaimer that the evolution material contained within was just one scientific theory... [ Continue reading: ] Exorcism Lessons Alarmed by the apparent growth of interest in Satanism and the occult, the Vatican has begun offering priests and theology students a course on black magic and exorcism through Rome's prestigious pontifical university, Regina Apostolorum. Students will have the benefit... [ Continue reading: ]  C of E: IRA Division After lengthy debate on whether women priests could be consecrated as bishops, the General Synod of the Church of England has resolved to continue discussing the matter at its next meeting in July. While ordained women at the meeting expressed... [ Continue reading: ] Vocation Training The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State have filed a complaint regarding religious proselytization in a Pennsylvania jail, charging that the only vocational training program available to prisoners forces them to participate in prayer and religious... [ Continue reading: ] Evangelical Rainbow Attack Kathryn Joyce: Eight pastors -- four white, three black and one latino; representing various theological and political backgrounds and church types; all of them evangelical -- walk into a bar. Make that a hotel room near Chicago's O'Hare airport. It's not the set-up for a joke, but for something that's becoming about as regimented: religion reporting that tries so hard to avoid stereotyping evangelicals as Falwell-esque culture warriors that it ends up inadvertently relaying a new PR line for a post-Falwell era. [ Continue reading: ] "Religion" by Fiat Boston University gets into the sticky business of defining what is and isn't a religion with their decision to recognize a group of Wiccans as part of an official religion (with full rights to a guaranteed weekly meeting place; a... [ Continue reading: ]  American Catholic Heroine L.A. Times stays with the story of Dorothy Stang, the American nun murdered by anti-environmentalist, anti-labor gunmen in Brazil. Good for them. We wrote on Sunday about our frustration that some politically conservative Catholics are ignoring her death. Our post... [ Continue reading: ] Goliath Wants In For those who care about such things, there's a yawny story in The Washington Times about some gung-ho ex-state trooper-turned-Virginia legislator names Charles Carrico, all ticked off because he's not allowed to tell school kids about Davy and Goliath so... [ Continue reading: ] Ghost in the Machine The ghost of a religion story comes in the form of a cliche in Tim Weiner's NYT story about the automation of the U.S. Army: "Trusting robots with potentially lethal decision-making may require a leap of faith in technology not... [ Continue reading: ] This Is What Christian Film Criticism Looks Like And the most damning indictment of evangelical passion for The Passion comes from... Christianity Today's Leadership Journal. "Maybe it's because (I know some readers will be tempted to write me off after reading this sentence) I was so frustrated by last year's promotional hype surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, and I was so frustrated by the movie itself," writes Brian McLaren, pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, MD. "For whatever reason, when I walked out of the recent film Hotel Rwanda, the story of a hotel manager who saves more than a thousand Tutsi refugees from Hutu-led genocide, this thought wouldn't leave me: If we really had the mind and heart of Christ, this is the movie we would be urging people in our churches to see." And McLaren just gets tougher from there. This, in a sense, is what "Christian film criticism" could look like. "Why," he asks his fellow evangelicals, "did so many churches urge people to see Gibson's film, and why did so few (if any?) promote Terry George's film? What do our answers to that question say about us?" [ Continue reading: ] Let Them Eat Blog Hey newspaper editors: Want to make sure nobody complains about "bias" ever again? There's a simple solution! Let them eat blog. Julie M. Moos, managing editor of Poynter Online ("everything you need to know to be a better journalist") asks "Are there people of a particular faith (Jewish, Baptist, Catholic, other) who feel ignored [by your paper]?" Y'think? Sure there are... [ Continue reading: ]  GQ Creation Kate Hawley: In the current issue of GQ, John Jeremiah Sullivan attends Creation, the nation’s largest Christian rock festival, where he finds abundant good vibes (no fights, no harassment, lots of kind people) as well as a few more questionable... [ Continue reading: ] What Does this Make Chocolate Labs? Bartholomew's Notes on Religion, a long-time fan of Christian conservative talkshow host Doug Giles, traces the lineage of Giles' exhortation that Christians adopt a Pitbull attitude back to British missionary CT Studd, who derided fellow Christians not as poodles, but... [ Continue reading: ] God's B-A-T-T-L-E Marilou Braswell, the University of Georgia cheerleading coach fired last year after charges that she discriminated against a non-Christian cheerleaders, told a Christian business group that she's fighting "God's battle" and compared her religious persecution lawsuit against UGA to the... [ Continue reading: ] Poor People Stuff In a column published yesterday in Beliefnet, former deputy director of the White House faith-based initiatives program David Kuo charged that the Bush administration had failed to follow through on the program because they lack real commitment to helping the... [ Continue reading: ] Religious Rally for Gay Rights Yesterday hundreds of gay rights supporters, including dozens of Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Unitarian religious leaders, held a religious-themed rally in Olympia, Washington. The rally took place between the state Supreme Court, which will soon hear arguments in a case... [ Continue reading: ]  Something Missing Death of a Salesman is a Jewish play precisely because it isn't Jewish, writes Karen Hartman, in an essay for Nextbook on Arthur Miller's Judaism, "domesticity built around absence, an ache the size of history." [ Continue reading: ] My Saudi Valentine In honor of Valentine's Day, Saudi Arabia's morality police have once again banned flower shops from selling red roses and red cards -- on pain of imprisonment -- to deter the celebration of a holiday they consider at odds with... [ Continue reading: ] God's Own Website The Los Angeles Times reports on some of the goods and services on offer at the annual National Religious Broadcasters convention in Anaheim: biblical health care insurance policies, a raffle for a piece of brimstone from Gomorrah, photos with Jesus... [ Continue reading: ] The Man with the Gold...Rules Mr. T begins preaching on Trinity Broadcast Network.... [ Continue reading: ]  All-Odin, All The Time "Moral relativism," it seems, plagues even Pagans. Mike, an Odinist incarcerated in Michigan Department of Corrections, writes to newWitch magazine to ask why it covers other religions...... [ Continue reading: ]
"Dorothy Stang" "Chico Mendes" "St. Blog's" "gay marriage"
Threat Logic Hired gunmen shot an American nun, 74-year-old Dorothy Stang of Ohio, in the face three times on Saturday. Stang, a member of the Catholic Congregation of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, had been helping Brazilian peasants fight (legally) the expropriation of their land by ranching and logging interests. So far, the conservative Catholic blogosphere seems disinterested. Maybe the dissonance -- "free markets" vs. nun-shooting -- is just too great. Does not compute. Must continue fight against foe more dangerous than gun-toting nun killers: gay marriage. [ Continue reading: ]
"The End of Faith" "Sam Harris" "atomic belief" "Benjamin Rutter"
Atomic Belief Ben Rutter: In the early months of the century, Sam Harris found himself apprenticed in the study of the brain. Combing over colored scans of minds at work, Harris, who is a graduate student, sought to correlate cognition and behavior. On September 12, 2001, his own behavior changed, and he began to write a book. Adjustments in his circuitry had corresponded in those days to the view that something in the world was going quickly, badly wrong. What was this? Elected leaders spoke of moral evil. For his colleagues at the MRI lab, the trouble hung in a mesh of inequalities. For Harris, however, the answer was more simple. The world had fallen ill not from want of goodness, or of goods, but from a diet poor in basic information... [ Continue reading: ]  According to Modern Science... "Modern science," reports Nicholas Kristof (be ware of any claim that begins with "modern science") "is turning up a possible reason why the religious right is flourishing and secular liberals aren't: instinct. It turns out that our DNA may predispose humans toward religious faith." There's more, but we recommend instead this response from Adam H. Becker, an occasional Revealer contributor and assistant professor of religious studies here at NYU: "One should perhaps be wary of Dean Hamer's arguments about the 'God Gene.' They are reductionist and fail to take into account religion as an essentially social phenomenon. They define religion as a private, subjective experience, which then only plays itself out in the social sphere. It is not a coincidence that Hamer's privileging of the experiential corresponds to certain notions of religion that have been put forward since Friedrich Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion of 1798. This internalization of the locus of religiosity was in part a direct response to the rise of science and the subsequent so-called disenchantment that occurred. Considering that many scholars of religion nowadays refuse even to define religion but rather see it as a term that is part of the intellectual and social history of the West with a very particular genealogy, I think Hamer's 'science' threatens to limit our perspective on an extremely complex phenomenon. Furthermore, he is also the author of Science of Desire: The Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior (1995), another book with problematic assumptions about human nature -- especially since our notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality seem to be modern concepts developed from the late 19th century onwards. Hamer's work tends to naturalize the culturally specific and thus reduces all human beings to a Western model." [ Continue reading: ]  Cheap Grace & Dumb Journalism Washington Post's Dan Balz says incoming DNC chair Howard Dean "offers a secular vision of the world at a time when Democrats worry that they have ceded the values of faith and spirituality to Republicans." Huh? What? Since when did... [ Continue reading: ] Miss Virtual Manners Bene Diction has some thoughts on calls for God-blog policing -- seemingly on the rise as religious bloggers sense that they're being watched.... [ Continue reading: ] What a Difference a Word Makes GetReligion has a two-part discussion of "The Dawn Eden Affair" as elaborated in an op-ed/profile by The New York Observer's George Gurley. Eden, a pro-life absolutist, self-described "Jew who’s accepted Jesus as the Messiah" and author of the blog Dawn... [ Continue reading: ] Show Me What Organized Atheism Looks Like This is what organized atheism looks like. (Proud to offer two dorky references for the price of one.)... [ Continue reading: ] Silver Ring (Scripture) Thing Can Jesus Christ make it in the world of herpes? More than $1 million dollars of federal funding since 2003 alone says it can. Marty Levine, News Editor of the Pittsburgh City Paper, gives a thorough and excellent report on the government-sponsored Silver Ring Thing abstinence program/Christian ministry that's been whispering in Rick Santorum's ear and openly admits that "abstinence is a tool" to reach unchurched youth. [ Continue reading: ] Pour Out Thy Wrath The Revealer's favorite Yiddish writer, Lamed Shapiro, appears in translation in the new edition of Pakn Treger, the magazine of the National Yiddish Book Center. Shapiro, writes Leah Garrett in an introduction, "introduced a new literary perspective on anti-Jewish violence. He was the first Jewish writer to show how Jews, in response to victimization, could themselves become victimizers." Read a translation of Shapiro's 1908 story, "Pour Out Thy Wrath" in PDF here; listen to it in Yiddish via a link here. [ Continue reading: ] Scalping There's an echo of faith -- violent, scary faith -- in this AP report on a scalping in Idaho. A 26-year-old woman scalped a 16-year-old girl because the girl had allegedly been disrespectful to women. Both belonged to what AP... [ Continue reading: ] Which Disease Spreads Faster? Religious epidemiology: Pilgrims returning from Mecca may be spreading polio, according to the World Health Organization. "We're staring at the whites of the eyes of this thing," the coordinator of the health organization's Global Polio Eradication Initiative tells The NYTimes.... [ Continue reading: ]  Talmud-Made-Easy Talmud for dummies: Brooklyn-based publisher ArtScroll/Mesorah has sunk $21 million into a new, 73-volume, easy English edition of the Talmud. Now that's some religion media.... [ Continue reading: ] Traditionally Republican Themes The LA Times reports that Dem Bob Hertzberg is running for mayor of the city on "traditionally Republican themes." And -- in defiance of the "moral values" quota with which every paper seems to cover such stories -- there's nary... [ Continue reading: ] The Menstrual Technique The Washington Post follows AP's lead a week late in reporting on sexual interrogation tactics used at Guantanomo to religiously humiliate Muslim prisoners. What explains the time lag? The Pentagon has issued a report confirming that the "techniques" -- including... [ Continue reading: ] Commie Harry "What really makes these critics hate Million Dollar Baby is not its supposedly radical politics -- which are nonexistent -- but its lack of sentimentality. It is, indeed, no Rocky, and in our America that departure from the norm is... [ Continue reading: ] What if the Catholic Church was a Democracy? You can vote here for your favorite Catholic blog in a number of categories. We're no experts, but the nominees seem to skew strongly conservative, theologically and politically. But then, so does "St. Blog's." We like a lot of the contenders, but we feel obliged to give special notice to a few of our favorites: Amy Welborn's Open Book; Mark Sullivan's Irish Elk; Barbara Nicolosi's Church of the Masses; Kathy Shaidle's Relapsed Catholic; and Bill Cork's Et Unum Sint. The Revealer has wrassled with most of these bloggers at one point or another (although they seem to given up on our crooked souls) and they haven't always been generous of spirit (except for Amy Welborn, who, in contrast to her commenters, is always generous of spirit), but they do interesting work and they're worth voting for if it'll help them feel good about it. Oh -- should be noted that Bill Cork thinks the vote might be rigged. Is nothing pure? [ Continue reading: ] What's a Nice Jewish Girl to Do? "How a beautiful, artistic, well-to-do Jewish girl became, by turns, a hippie and still later a fundamentalist Christian makes for a fascinating chapter in the story of postwar Jewish identity." Paul Zakrzewski reviews Assembling My Father in Forward.... [ Continue reading: ]  KKK Crashes Equality Party A Kentucky mother, Lisa Whiteside, has withdrawn her son from a local high school after protests over the allegedly uneven application of the school's strict dress code, which Whiteside claims was enforced against her son (who wore a button-down shirt... [ Continue reading: ] Boy Jesus At the behest of an Italian TV station, forensic scientists created a picture of Jesus from the Shroud of Turin and then used computer enhancement programs normally used to "age" photos of missing children to "back age" the picture to... [ Continue reading: ] Symbol of God The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's doctrinal agency in charge of defending the Church from heresy, has issued a stern notification regarding Jesuit Fr. Roger Haight's book, Jesus: Symbol of God, which was an attempt to... [ Continue reading: ] Islamic Fundraiser Deported Abdel-Jabbar Hamdan, a Palestinian-born fund-raiser for an Islamic charity allegedly tied to Hamas and the founder of an Anaheim mosque, was ordered deported for supporting an organization that "advocates terrorism."... [ Continue reading: ] Dignity of Marriage The Vatican has issued a 111-page guide, titled "Dignity of Marriage," revising the procedure of annulments so that they are slightly easier to obtain. The guidelines ease the requirements of a church appeals court to approve of annulments granted at... [ Continue reading: ]  Who's a Jew? "The story of a Jew masquerading as a Muslim sounds like a bad joke," writes Malcolm Jones in Newsweek. To us, it sounds like the lede of a book review built on racialist assumptions. Jones reviews Tom Reiss' new book The Orientalist, about Kurban Said, nee Lev Nussinbaum, author of -- among other books -- Ali and Nino, which Jones describes as Azerbaijans "one literary classic," which is a quick way of saying that it's the one of the few Azerbaijani books to translated into English and thus made eligible for "classic" status. These categories are fixed, you know -- just as one's religious identity is. The Orientalist is the biography of an Azerbaijani Jew who, as a teenager, began living as a Muslim, an identity he embraced for the rest of his life. In other words, he was a convert. But to the folks at Newsweek, once a Jew, always a Jew. The subhed -- for which Jones was likely not responsible -- labels Said a "shape-shifter." The hed is even more essentialist: "Passing for Muslim." So: Is Cat Stevens a "shape-shifter"? Was Barry Goldwater merely "passing" as a Christian? It seems true that Said invented a life story for himself at odds with his Jewish past. But if this is the criteria by which we judge whether a person is a "real" Muslim -- or a real Christian, Jew, etc. -- anyone who's ever aggrandized their ancestry is up for religious re-evaluation. [ Continue reading: ] It's Not Unusual to Be Offended by Anyone... Death-threat recipient and author, Salman Rushdie, comes out strongly against Tony Blair's proposed ban on inciting religious hatred, and not just for the reasons one might think. For one, Rushdie begins, because it will make England more like the American... [ Continue reading: ] He Paints His Face at Night... Former Christian Coalition leader, Republican Wunderkind and self-proclaimed guerilla warrior, Ralph Reed, has taken preliminary steps towards a candidacy for the lieutenant governor's office in Georgia -- a somewhat ambiguous position that's nonetheless attracting nearly as much attention as the... [ Continue reading: ] A Compassionate Budget While President Bush's proposed budget is making headlines for its hidden surprises and its suggested cuts to more than 150 traditional social service programs -- including health care, veterans' prescriptions, food stamps, and housing benefits for the poor or disabled... [ Continue reading: ] The 30-Year Scare Retired journalist Lee Ellis knows Easter's coming when his email inbox fills up with pleas to protest an atheist petition titled RM 2493 that is perennially said to be under review by the FCC, demanding that the agency remove any... [ Continue reading: ]  Motorhead Duck Song Michael J. Behe, a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute, pleads the case of Intelligent Design in The New York Times, explaining I.D.'s "four linked claims," and disingenuously describing the first two controversial assumptions as "uncontroversial." It's an exercise in... [ Continue reading: ] "A Return to Modesty" In Peshawar the youth wing of the political party, Jamaat-i-Islami, has threatened the local government to remove advertising billboards with pictures of women by next week, or they'll do it themselves. The youth party, known as Shabab-i-Milli, staged a similar,... [ Continue reading: ] How do you get evangelicals behind conservationism when their idea of environmentalist is a tree-hugging pagan? In part, writes Blaine Harden in a two-part report for The Washington Post, by changing all the names associated with green living, from environmentalism,... [ Continue reading: ] Shiva Classic Thong If it offends religious groups to put their sacred symbols on the insoles of shoes, try try again, and put them on a thong.... [ Continue reading: ] Secularism: Still Fundamentalist After All these Months Bishop of Exeter Michael Langrish followed in the Vatican's footsteps by condemning "secular fundamentalism," here defined by half-price Christ-out-of-Christmas complaints; by calls for a local Anglican/Roman Catholic adoption agency to allow same-sex couples to adopt children; and the controversy stirred... [ Continue reading: ]  Dude, We're So Hosed The website of Prayer Breakfast Network, a group dedicated to replicating the National Prayer Breakfast in cities across the country, reveals the real agenda of the annual event: "Leaders of other nations who come to Washington, D.C. frequently are hosed at special breakfasts or dinners." [ Continue reading: ] It's Good to Be Rich "For years [British] churches criticised Conservative governments and Baroness Thatcher. Now their views more closely reflect her famous comment that 'no one would remember the Good Samaritan if he only had good intentions. He had money as well.'" The British... [ Continue reading: ] Evil Preachers Are Scary "In the Hollywood representational rubric," writes New Pantagruelist Patton Dodd (also, we're proud to say, a Buddha Killer and a Revealer) "evangelical characters are often contextualized by aggression. They are, in fact, forces of violence: they inspire it, enact it, relish in it. Hollywood films turn on shorthand, and the dominant trope for evangelicals is hostility: dogmatic and opinionated in the Falwellian mode, yes, but also ready to wield an axe. Watch a Hollywood flick with a conservative evangelical character, and the screen will splatter with blood -- or at least a close ideological approximation." [ Continue reading: ]  NY Same-Sex Marriage Ruling In a 62-page decision issued this morning in New York City, State Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan said that the New York State Constitution guarantees basic freedoms to lesbian and gay people—and that those rights are violated when same-sex couples... [ Continue reading: ] ABC Panders FAIR, a liberal media criticism group, calls our attention to a segment on alleged liberal censorship of conservative ideas in higher education broadcast on ABC's Feb. 1st "World News Tonight." Correspondent Dan Harris offered as an example a community college that forbid a screening of Mel Gibson's Passion because of its R rating... [ Continue reading: ]
"Steven Weiss", "Super Bowl", "Sports and Religion", "Reggie White", "Terry Owens", "Minister of Defense"
Sunday Passions By Steven I. Weiss: Does the sports beat get God? [ Continue reading: ] The End of the Story It's like a parody of Philip Roth. Our heroine is Wendy Shalit, whose sister, Ruth, made a brief career of looking cute and writing conservative. But short skirts and plunging necklines didn't cover up the fact that the empress had no clothes: Before there was Stephen Glass, there was Ruth Shalit, and she got outed as not only a liar, but a plagiarist as well. Then little sis Wendy went to Williams, where she, too, discovered the joys of giving good conservatism... [ Continue reading: ] Four Years to Come Up With a Better Metaphor Red churches and blue churches are here to stay. So says John Green, director of the University of Akron's Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, who just released the results of a nationwide survey that indicated continuing polarization between... [ Continue reading: ]
Time, evangelical, "25 most influential evangelicals", "James Dobson", "Ted Haggard", "T.D. Jakes", LaHaye, "Omri Elisha"
It's the Movement, Stupid Omri Elisha: Time has just published an annotated list of "The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America." The Revealer asked me to write about it. I said I had nothing to say. After I bought it, I flipped through the list and it seemed appropriate enough. I laid it down on my desk, and headed out for dinner. Then it hit me. [ Continue reading: ] Jesus Christ, Supermodel Milan has banned a poster ad campaign put out by the French fashion company, Marithé and François Girbaud, featuring a group of women posing in a Last Supper tableau with a Davinci Code-inspired twist: one male model standing in as... [ Continue reading: ] Spidey-Christ The evangelical magazine Christianity Today has made a list of the "10 most redeeming films of the year. Most surprising redeemer? Spiderman II, which CT calls "The Passion redux." The magazine presents a separate list of the plain old ten best, redemption be darned. Most surprising -- as in jaw-dropping surprising -- Mike Leigh's powerful, pro-choice drama Vera Drake comes in tied for 9th. Spidey gets honorable mention. [ Continue reading: ] Absolute Doubt Jay Rosen's Pressthink features an interesting discussion about a recent New York Times article on some Iraqi bloggers. There was nothing religious about the original article, but the question of what was wrong with it led to a back-and-forth in... [ Continue reading: ]  We Bring You Free Movies New York readers: Friday, Feb. 4, The Center for Religion and Media (publisher of The Revealer) presents a free screening of Control Room, the 2004 documentary on Al Jazeera, followed by a roundtable with the filmmakers, Khaled Fahmy (NYU, Middle East Studies), and Revealer founder Jay Rosen. 4 pm, Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8th St. [ Continue reading: ] Chronicle v. Times: The Oscars By Kate Hawley: San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle leads his article about this year’s Oscar nominations with a joke about how the Academy Awards provide fodder for “spiritual reflection.†The Washington Times agrees, but they’re not kidding. [ Continue reading: ] Hefley's Lost Crusade There's a ghost of a religion story in the news that House Republican leaders have booted ethics chair Rep. Joel Hefley in favor of more malleable ethics "leadership" friendly to ethically-challenged House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Hefley is no liberal... [ Continue reading: ] Jim Bakker: The Gated Community A Missouri developer has bought 590 acres of land on the site of a failed theme park called Camelot in order to built a Christian-themed residential community centered around Jim Bakker's new broadcast studio. The proposed community would be called... [ Continue reading: ] Zionism is Discriminatory? Ya Think? The end of Zionism? “In a landmark decision, Israel’s attorney general ruled last week that one of the fundamental tenets upon which the Jewish state was built — acquiring and reserving land for Jews to live on — is discriminatory... [ Continue reading: ] Spiritual Cold War The North Korean secret police "cannot staunch the word of the gospel," writes The Times' Michael Sheridan. "Two of our party turned out to be Christian businessmen who had come from China carrying wads of cash. Korean-language Bibles have been... [ Continue reading: ] W.: What About God? The Revealer's normal modus operandi is to say: Didja see that? Religion! In the secular news! We're always on the lookout for the god in the machine, and no more so than in the sermons of our preacher-in-chief. Dude's brilliant.... [ Continue reading: ]  Holy TennCare Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen met with more than 350 clergy members Tuesday to ask them to search for "'obligations and opportunities'" to serve people in need, focusing in particular on churches helping to fund TennCare, the state's faltering health care... [ Continue reading: ] Richard Ostling Had Nothing to Do With Him Oh, the bias of mainstream media against religion and Oh, the liberal conspiracy of it all, proven again by AP columnist and religion writer Richard N. Ostling, reviewing yet another revised Bible, The Inclusive Hebrew Scriptures and The Inclusive New... [ Continue reading: ] Gay Marriage in Canada The Liberal minority of the Canadian government has filed a bill in the House of Commons to legalize gay marriage nationwide with the strong backing of Prime Minister Paul Martin who argued that Canada is "'a country of minorities'" and... [ Continue reading: ] "Funding the Culture Wars" The National Committ for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), a self-described watchdog group that promotes "public accountability" from foundations, grant-givers and private donors, has released a new report following the money trail between conservative foundation grandmakers and evangelical culture warriors promoting "traditional"... [ Continue reading: ] The Ascendancy of Ned Flanders The writers of The Simpsons know how to gauge the cultural climate. And so they've revamped the role of Ned Flanders, Springfield's holiest neighbor who's apparently inching his way towards center stage -- this week co-producing a biblical pageant for... [ Continue reading: ] Things to Debate in Denver When You're Almost Dead The Colorado Supreme Court is hearing arguments about whether or not to reinstate the death sentence of a convicted murderer and rapist who in 1995 was given the death penalty by jury members who consulted the Bible to see what... [ Continue reading: ] Chronicle v. Times: The Sermons Kate Hawley: Over the last week, The Revealer undertook an informal comparison of religion coverage in the web editions of The Washington Times and The San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com). The goal was to get a snapshot of how the Times, the conservative organ of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, compares to a paper published in the land of the Castro and Haight-Ashbury. [ Continue reading: ]  Sonogram Religion Religious media: James Dobson's evangelical Focus on the Family "has budgeted $4.2 million in the current fiscal year for [ultrasound] machines and on training on how to use them." The premise being, apparently, that seeing is believing. Which leaves God... [ Continue reading: ] James Dobson, Meet John Wayne Gacy Look, SpongeBob could be the queen of golden showers and he still wouldn't hold a candle to this sad clown story of the redemptive power of McDonald's, published by James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Henry Darger would be jealous.... [ Continue reading: ] Iraq, Heaven on Earth "Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen...." [ Continue reading: ] Professor All-Things Scott Mclemee, the last public intellectual standing, has jumped ship from The Chronicle of Higher Ed to Inside Higher Ed, a new challenger to the Chronicle created by the Chron's former top editors. At Inside Higher Ed, Scott will be unchained: a columnist of "Allery-Wissenchaft (the Science of Things in General)." [ Continue reading: ] Blood Libel in Russia New York blogger Bnei Levi has translated the anti-Semitic letter/petition written by 19 nationalist Russian parliamentarians and signed by another 450-500 public figures, which called for the investigation and possible banning of all Jewish groups. The letter, titled "Jewish Happiness,... [ Continue reading: ] Some Revelation's at Hand? Last week The Christian Century reported that the Church of the Brethren, a pacifist church which has historically opposed military service, announced that it would comply with a request from the Selective Service to institute an "alternative service" program for... [ Continue reading: ] Hillary Gods-Up WNYC's Brian Lehrer picks up on Sen. Hillary Clinton's recent God-talk, speaking with The American Prospect's Michael Tomasky. Listen now.... [ Continue reading: ] Creationism on the Free Market While Intelligent Design proponents spark angry letters to the editor and cocktail-party arguments nationwide, The New York Times' Cornelia Dean finds that the more troubling -- and far-less publicized -- challenge to evolution curriculum is science teachers who are too... [ Continue reading: ] Super Bowl, Super Jesus With the National Football League and 100,000 fans about to descend on Jacksonville, Florida, local Christians recognize what's going on: "'a God opportunity.'" Jacksonville, which CharismaNOW characterizes as "one of the most religiously oriented venues" in Super Bowl history, is... [ Continue reading: ] Popetown Popetown, a satirical cartoon set in the Vatican that was cancelled by the BBC after numerous protests by British Catholics, will be broadcast on the Italian satellite channel, CanalJimmy.... [ Continue reading: ] |
