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   On The Media Revealer editor Jeff Sharlet talks with with Bob Garfield of WNYC's On The Media about Justice Sunday and why the secular press can't cover "spiritual war." [ Continue reading: ]  Join the Rebellion Are you unhappy with traditional religion, but feel a desire for spiritual adventure, full of danger, intrigue and untamed faith? And do you really like Star Wars? Well -- who'd have guessed? -- there's an evangelical group just for you,... [ Continue reading: ] Christianizing History The UPI reports on the statuary surrounding the Belgorod, Russia site of the 1943 Battle of Kursk, where 600,000 German and Soviet soldiers died in a 50-day battle that left the Nazi tank army destroyed, and finds that, though the... [ Continue reading: ] A Brief History of Rhyme: Stephen Hawking Battles the Fundamentalists Ken Leavitt-Lawrence channels Stephen Hawking for a comic book/gangsta rap music video showdown with "The Fundamentalist" and his henchmen, Cain and Abel, to protect the world's scientists from being transformed into sheep by The Fundamentalist's "Dogma Ray." Watch now: "What We Need More of is Science." [ Continue reading: ] The Way of the Cross and Abu Ghraib St. Paul's Episcopal Church in East Norwalk, Connecticut, has installed controversial new Stations of the Cross that include paintings depicting the war in Iraq and the abuses at Abu Ghraib alongside traditional Christian images in a contemporary exploration of crucifixion... [ Continue reading: ]  Brother Mario "The second challenge is to reassess the alterable rules made for us by the male descendants of Peter who were and are humanly frail, as he was, and to readjust those rules to better serve the purpose of helping modern... [ Continue reading: ] Alaska Christian Doug Lederman of Inside Higher Ed reports on the lawsuit brought by the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation against the U.S. Secretary of Education over its awarding $430,000 in federal funds this year (and over $1 million in the past... [ Continue reading: ] Of Human Stains Kate Hawley: When a salt stain on the wall of a Chicago underpass began to gain credence as miraculous image of the Virgin Mary, the news ricocheted from Internet and cable all the way to the hallowed halls of the Associated Press and NPR. The more people arrived with cameras and flowers and candles, the bigger the news became, and the bigger the news became, the more people arrived with cameras and flowers and even illnesses they wanted healed. [ Continue reading: ] American Aquarium Drinker Peter Manseau: Drunk on pop-culture holiness, it's easy to forget the nation's first noble truth: America is not a religious metaphor. [ Continue reading: ]  Human Capital What's been missing from the Social Security debate? A good scapegoat (the AARP won't do anymore; sorry USA Next), and the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society has found one in deadbeat procreators: those workers with small families or... [ Continue reading: ] It's Not What It Looks Like... Speaking at an American Studies conference about "Politics and Religion in USA" at an Islamabad university, Deputy Chief of Mission for the United States Embassy Patricia A. Butenis felt compelled to explain that, despite all appearances, the U.S. really is... [ Continue reading: ] Jews for Christians Religion & Society points to FrontPageMag.com for a story on the new group, "Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation" (JAACD), which has formed "to combat anti-Christian prejudice in Hollywood, the news media, academia, politics and the courts," and to generally support Christians... [ Continue reading: ]  F.O.R. (Friend of Ratzinger) "God becoming man! I can only laugh at the arrogance of men -- males --to shrink God into a creature so small." Just another "radical feminist"? Not exactly. Read more from Pope Benedict's long-time intellectual comrade, Uta Ranke-Heinemann, at one of our favorite religion magazines, SOMA. [ Continue reading: ] Beitar Illit Athletic Foundation More Jack Abramoff fallout: The Republican "superlobbyist" who keeps popping up in unfortunate poses ever since Tom DeLay's fundraising activities came to light takes another blow with the revelations in a Newsweek report that he'd redirected donations made by Native... [ Continue reading: ] Trinity Students Return Minority students at Trinity International University in Illinois returned to classes on Monday, a week after 43 of the evangelical college's black and Latino students were evacuated to a hotel in response to threatening racist letters sent through the campus... [ Continue reading: ] Everybody Plays the Fool Could it be, Hillary Clinton, not meaning what she said? Attempting to crassly manipulate voters with lukewarm appeals to both sides of an issue in the hopes she won't be held to promises made to either one? We've been cheated... [ Continue reading: ] Justice Revisited Kate Hawley: Two days after "Justice Sunday," the reviews are in: the Church telecast starring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) that sought to end the use of a filibuster to block judicial nominees was, "a big mistake," "misbegotten," fully ideological, largely partisan," "shameful," "a distressing new low," a "grotesque religio-political circus," and finally, "almost too stupid to rebut." Almost, but not quite. [ Continue reading: ] ADL A new nationwide survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League has found that 14% of adult Americans hold hard-core anti-Semitic beliefs, especially on the old standby topics: Jews' loyalty to the country, the death of Jesus, and power. The new poll... [ Continue reading: ]  Radio On Revealer editor Jeff Sharlet discusses his cover story from the May issue of Harper's, "Soldiers of Christ: Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch," tonight at 9:22 pm est with Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder on Air America's "The Majority Report."... [ Continue reading: ] The Iwo Jima Option While Bill Frist's video appearance on yesterday's "Justice Sunday" telecast is earning him rebukes aplenty, he does have one solid friend in Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who writes a plaintiff op-ed for The Courier-Journal, wondering why Democrats are allowed to... [ Continue reading: ] Passover Gorillas Gorillas in Israel kept kosher this Passover: with zookeepers and handlers unable to handle leavened bread, the gorillas and other animals also ate matzo instead of their normal morning meal of bread with cream cheese. "'We call this environmental enrichment,'"... [ Continue reading: ] White-Hot Brother Love The Revealer's Jeff Sharlet on using sex as a weapon, at Nerve: "Take, for example, God's Gift to Women (the title of a manliness guide for young men), male 'headship' of the American family. Women can't get enough of good headship, but a man must be careful; a woman's hunger for his headship may lead him to abuse its potency through the sin of anger. A few years ago, I learned in an evangelical magazine what to do in such a situation: push your anger down and store it inside your heart, where Jesus will work it over it until it is ready to be 'released,' transformed into 'white-hot brother love...'" [ Continue reading: ]  Pledge of Wishful Thinking Is "under God" Christian? Don't listen to the Supreme Court arguments; listen to Colorado Christians. A Colorado middle school counselor, Margo Lucero, has angered local Christian parents with her ecumenical delivery of the Pledge of Allegiance one morning last week,... [ Continue reading: ] Who You Callin' Christian? Mainline Protestants fight back: NYT "conservative beat" reporter David D. Kirkpatrick, with Sheryl Gay Stolberg, bring us signs of a liberal Christianity gearing up for battle, as representatives challenge Senator Bill Frist for his planned participation in an upcoming Christian... [ Continue reading: ] Leather God "'The flogger, with each lash of the whip,'" says Master Skip, a man of God and leather, "'has one message: now, now, now, now.'" For Skip Chasey, a Christian leatherman, such immediacy lifts one from worldly distraction and into communion with God, whom he defines as "everything you can't say." More lived religion in Nerve's excellent ongoing "Moral Values" issue. [ Continue reading: ]  The Moon Position "Moonie" mass marriages are legend; but what about the consumation? Yolanda Elise Brener recalls her days of passion and holy handkerchiefs with her Unification Church-appointed "eternal spouse" in Nerve's "Moral Values" issue. [ Continue reading: ] Wars On Faiths Jewish leaders from the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and B'nai B'rith International have all bristled at the conservative message -- promoted in recent events like... [ Continue reading: ] This Is Our Chapel, These Are Our Guns In the town vying for the title of America's holy warringest city, there's also an Air Force Academy, and lately, the differences -- and overlaps -- between Colorado Springs' young soldiers and its civilian brigades of evangelical spiritual warriors have... [ Continue reading: ] Sick of It All A bit belatedly, John Kerry chastises Republicans for their God politics: for politicizing religion, having an "'orthodoxy of view,'" and suggesting they understand Judeo-Christianity better than liberal believers; and for "using God" to justify political moves. Speaking to a group... [ Continue reading: ] Republicans and Mammon Hawley: Stirrings in the conservative underworld: The New York Times reported this week on the political fortunes of Ralph Reed, formerly of the Christian Coalition, who is running for Lieutenant Governor in Georgia. Pat Robertson has denounced his old protégé,... [ Continue reading: ]  Salt-Stain Mary and Priest Jokes: Media Returns to Normal The media strikes the Catholic news while the public-interest iron is still hot, delivering these two cute, and ever-so-slightly irreverent stories to transition us from JP II praise songs to Hitler's Youth exposés: First, the Catholic priest-shortage has led to... [ Continue reading: ] Axes: Bold as Love and Hate The gay-friendly empire is striking back. A resistance is underway. An alliance has been formed between rabbis of all three major non-orthodox branches of Judaism -- conservative, reform and reconstructionalist -- and Jerusalem's Gay and Lesbian Center to support the... [ Continue reading: ] Generation Gap: Muslim U.K. Style A meeting of the Muslim Council of Britain, the main umbrella group for Muslims in Britain which gathered to discuss a "voter guide" for the next general election, was disrupted by a group of young Muslim protesters thought to be... [ Continue reading: ] Translating for True Believers Sharlet: Paul Asay of The Colorado Springs Gazette reports on the minor media blitz surrounding New Life Church, a congregation of 11,000 in his hometown pastored by Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and thus a power... [ Continue reading: ] Voice o' God Maureen Dowd fits a little bit of everything God-newsy into her Times column on the state of the Voice of God today: the image of stately Ted Koppel balking at covering "wet burka" contests; the VoG authority of old patriarch... [ Continue reading: ] Nice Guy Ratzinger Sharlet: I listened to the pope yesterday on a long drive from New York to New Hampshire. When I tuned in -- NPR and BBC, depending on reception -- NPR was swooning over the pomp and circumstance, casting about for... [ Continue reading: ] Angels and Demons and the Small Antimatter Trap Kate Hawley: A lavish, illustrated edition of Angels and Demons, the prequel to The DaVinci Code, comes out in May. The approximate size and heft of a textbook, it’s filled with photos and illustrations of Christian sites and symbols. The book’s hero, one Robert Langdon, Harvard symbologist, must navigate these in order to find an evil weapon -- antimatter... Angels and Demons, first published in 2000, drew nowhere near the vitriol The DaVinci Code did three years later, in part because it took liberties not with church history but with scientific accuracy. [ Continue reading: ]  Revelators "I must confess that I was reeled in by its slick production values. Granted, its use of scripture is an embarrassment and the Christian characters in it are either mysterious Vatican types or, as I'm assuming we'll soon see, Protestant... [ Continue reading: ] Black Market Tea The Supreme Court has decided to hear a case on whether or not a Brazil-based church in New Mexico may continue to use a hallucinogenic tea containing a drug banned in the U.S. in its religious services. The Bush administration... [ Continue reading: ] Is it Weird, Is it White? New pope. Update: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Check here later, when the site recovers from the news.... [ Continue reading: ] Cosmic Couples Therapy Another entry in the "Is the media Catholic?" files: Susan Gilbert, writing in the Health and Science section of The New York Times, reports at length about why couples therapy won't save your marriage in the long run and how... [ Continue reading: ]  Freedoms To and From: Anti-Conversion Legislation in Sri Lanka The long-standing conflict between Sri Lankan Buddhists and the Christian missionaries they accuse of conducting unethical or coerced conversions gained more international attention last week as the World Evangelical Alliance met with the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to lobby... [ Continue reading: ] The Touch, the Feel of God A St. Paul local news station, WCCO, delivers a fuzzy -- in terms of both warm sentiment and lack of detail -- report on "the God Squad": a volunteer group of Christian clergy associated with the local police force who... [ Continue reading: ] God Bless America -- Or Else Religious fascism at Yankee Stadium? Evangelical scholar and writer Randall Balmer says it's so when singing "God Bless America" becomes a compulsory part of the ballgame. On the Christian site, The Matthew's House Project.... [ Continue reading: ]  The Nuclear Option and the Wild, Wild East There's so much to love about "Justice Sunday," that it's hard to decide what to love best: the "high noon" ring of the title; the flier graphics showing a young, double-fisted believer slinging Bible n' gavel, ready to take on... [ Continue reading: ] Hamas Morality Police Hamas has admitted that three to five of its gunmen were responsible for the murder and brutal desecration of the body of a 20-year Palestinian woman in an "honor killing" over "a mistaken 'suspicion of immoral behavior.'" The Gaza Strip... [ Continue reading: ] Festival of Pits 80 Indian parents have been charged by New Delhi Police with burying their children alive in an ancient Hindu ceremony called "the festival of pits," wherein some first-born children are buried under leaves and dirt for up to a minute... [ Continue reading: ] And They're Off! Those who prefer their pope-news in the style of The Daily Racing Form will find an excellent guide to ponies -- Ratzinger ahead by nose! -- compiled by Doug LeBlanc at Get Religion.... [ Continue reading: ] Luther in Brazil Reporting on the growth of evangelicalism in Latin America isn't exactly "news," but Henry Chu's LA Times feature on the transformation is an exception to the usual fare for several reasons. First, because he turns to Latin American talking heads... [ Continue reading: ]  Scalia: Too Sexy for the Supreme Court? If you're looking for smart journalism about the legal and religious ideas of Supreme Court Justice Scalia, perhaps the most conservative Christian to ever sit on the court, try Margaret Talbot's profile in the March 3 New Yorker (q&a with... [ Continue reading: ] Blame Game The conservative Washington Times can't be faulted for lack of transparency in its coverage of Tom "The Hammer" DeLay. We admire them for publishing the full transcript of an interview the paper's editors and reporters conducted with the congressman, including... [ Continue reading: ] Where Are They Now? After the Promise Keepers' stadium-filling, beach ball-bouncing heyday in the 1990s, the evangelical group that urged men to assume their God-given roles as heads of the family and benevolent controllers of wives, dwindled to a fraction of its former glory... [ Continue reading: ] Belief, Belief, Good for the Heart... Religion -- or more likely, the maintenance of social ties that regular church attendance affords -- has been found to slow cognitive declines in Alzheimer's patients according to a study released yesterday. Another study released yesterday also promoted the health... [ Continue reading: ]  Day of Noise In an effort to counter the success of the annual Day of Silence, a nationwide event to oppose anti-gay bias observed today at hundreds of schools and colleges, the Alliance Defense Fund -- with the endorsement of Focus on the... [ Continue reading: ] Nicholas D. Kristof Shows Us His Cheeks Why, oh why, do they hate us so? Such is the question posed by earnest Nick Kristof in "A Slap in the Face," yesterday's column for The NYT. The "they" and the "us" are the masses and the media, separated... [ Continue reading: ] Cover the Uninsured Week A large-scale interfaith effort, including representatives from the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Council of Churches, the United Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the Islamic Society of North America, the Salvation Army, and six other... [ Continue reading: ] Gaming God New opportunities abound as ever to introduce your children to spiritual warfare the fun n' easy way, whether with the new Focus on the Family-licensed video games "Adventures in Odyssey" and forthcoming Christian music dance-pad game (created by gaming company... [ Continue reading: ] Rockin' With Roy As media enthusiasts, we can't claim to honor the second commandment -- no graven images -- but we always hoped the true believers would steer clear of idols. But everybody's a fan of something: "At Reclaiming America, [Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments] Rock sits out front, fresh off a tour of twenty-one states, perched on the flag-festooned flatbed of a diesel truck, a potent symbol of the 'faith-based' justice the Dominionists are bent on imposing. Activists at the conference pose for photographs beside the rock and have circulated a petition urging President Bush to appoint Moore -- who once penned an opinion calling for the state to execute 'practicing homosexuals' -- to the U.S. Supreme Court." This and plenty more oogie-boogie details from a Christian right conference in Ft. Lauderdale in Rolling Stone. Is this story hysterical and overstated? Sure. Are its subjects -- an A-list of the Christian far right gathered around D. James Kennedy -- hysterical and overstated? You decide. "In the conference's opening ceremony, the Dominionists recite an oath they dream of hearing in every classroom: 'I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior for whose kingdom it stands. One Savior, crucified, risen and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.'" [ Continue reading: ]  Shocking Confessions An Onion-esque Ekklesia headline, "Tabloids royally shocked by Christian belief in repentance," responds to the car crash of scandal-mongering and theology that occurred last week as British tabloids partially digested the news that Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles would recite... [ Continue reading: ] The Messiah May Yet Save Your Town Aryeh Deri, former leader of the ultra-orthodox Shas party in Israel, addressed right-wing Jewish activists on Sunday, warning them that attempts to enter Temple Mount en masse could lead to violent retaliation from Muslim countries, and that any human intervention... [ Continue reading: ] Putting a Hit on the "Judicial War on Faith" The "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference, the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration, and Christian Reconstructionism, oh my! Salon's Michelle Goldberg writes about last week's "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny" conference in Washington D.C., wherein 200 or so religious right... [ Continue reading: ] Key Words: In Its Tracks The head of the 2.7 million-member National American Legion, Commander Thomas P. Cadmus, has entered the Boy Scout fray with written requests to Congress, asking it to amend Title 42, The Civil Rights Act, to prevent the American Civil Liberties... [ Continue reading: ] Losing Religion in the Holy Land "When asked by friends why I no longer pray or fast I reply that living in the Holy Land has cured me of religion." Elen Ghulam, writing in Muslim WakeUp!, describes losing one's religion over a Jerusalem coffee shop bombing,... [ Continue reading: ] Who's Afraid of the Holy Ghost? In a set of guidelines for religious education released this week in England, teachers have been instructed to avoid frightening children with certain explanations of religious practice, such as describing the Eucharist as becoming the blood and body of Christ,... [ Continue reading: ]  Reading Niebuhr Instead "For all his love of country, Niebuhr never learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. What he did love was that Americans, as a nation, really worried about the bomb. We knew our power, and understood that we were free, and suddenly capable, to exercise it -- but never without guilt. The irony of our history was based in knowing our real culpability in becoming a world power, in recognizing that we were far less innocent than our theories of democracy, free-market capitalism, militarism, and evangelicalism assumed...The enemy had the audacity to claim divine purpose. America, said Niebuhr, knew better." Revealer Books Editor Scott Korb reads Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History and finds a worthy model of Christian realism for the reality-based community. [ Continue reading: ] Barricading the Holy Land Yesterday, 3,000 Israeli police officers surrounded the Al Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem with a steel barrier in order to prevent a right-wing Jewish protest/mass prayer from taking place at the contested Temple Mount site. The rally, intended as a... [ Continue reading: ] OTB: Doctrine Division No matter who wins the online pot on the pope's successor, writes David Von Drehle of The Washington Post, the U.S. Catholic Church will be faced with a number of questions concerning the traditional hierarchy of the Church and the... [ Continue reading: ] Sharia Law and the Press A week after the Saudi Arabian government decided to move certain lawsuits out of religious courts and into specialized, secular courts run by related ministries (i.e., trying press and publication trials in information ministry courts), a group of Muslim clerics... [ Continue reading: ] Canadian Values At a number of religious rallies held in support of same-sex marriage across Canada, Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other religious leaders demonstrated for their right to perform gay and lesbian marriages, with one pastor adding that gay marriage is about... [ Continue reading: ]  Paradoxes of the Pope Ariel Dorfman on the pope and five minutes in Chile that define the paradox of the papacy. And the retired archbishop of Brazil on the pope's divided heart -- John Paul II, says the cardinal, wrote a letter to the Brazilian bishops declaring liberation theology necessary; seems to have censored or even altered the records of the Synod of Bishops in Rome; and, when the Brazilian cardinal retired, refused to sign a letter condemning the Brazilian presented to him -- as if it were written by his own hand -- by the Roman Curia. More at Open Democracy, a fine new site. [ Continue reading: ]  Crazy for the Anti-Christ Protestant pope-mania: What does it mean? For insight into the evangelical adoration of the man Martin Luther, the Westminster Confession, and generations of fundamentalists insisted must, by virtue of his office, be the anti-Christ, no better source can be found... [ Continue reading: ] National Motto Display Act "The National Motto Display Act," a proposed Pennsylvania law soon to come before the state House, would require every public school classroom, auditorium and cafeteria in Pennsylvania to display the "national statement of faith," "In God We Trust," as "part... [ Continue reading: ] Here We Are Now, Entertain Us Church Marketing Sucks -- which, despite its title, is actually a very pro-Christian-advertising blog devoted to making church self-promotion more effective, more graceful, less...sucky -- reports approvingly on two recent marketing schemes employed by Westwinds Community Church in Jackson, Michigan.... [ Continue reading: ] China Patriotic Church Antoaneta Bezlova of Inter Press Service reports on the speculation that the pope's successor may normalize relations between China and the Vatican, more than fifty years after China's government expelled foreign priests and cut all ties with the Holy See;... [ Continue reading: ] Scalia in the South Speaking at a Red Mass banquet in Shreveport, Louisiana, Justice Antonin Scalia derided the conception of "acceptable religion" among educated sophisticates in the North; instead praising the ground he stood on: the unsnobbish South where orthodox believers and "traditional Christians"... [ Continue reading: ]  The Reverent and the Rude Media in the Home of the Free and the Brave, by Garret Keizer: "Is the Pope Catholic?" we ask, meaning, "Are you kidding?" But when a pope dies, one is tempted to ask, "Is the media Catholic?" and one is not kidding... [ Continue reading: ] Big In The Trading Card World Religious kitsch is a fact of life for religion writers, and after awhile the wobbly pope dolls and the wind-up nun who spits sparks and the neon psychedelic Jesus get pretty old. It is especially rare to find a work of religious Americana, combining flag and Bible, that has anything new to offer. But such is "America, We Stand As One," by Dennis Madalone. It is, as we are fond of saying of our favorite religious writing, the Word made strange -- and the word here is "Corny." Transcendently corny, cheese so pungent it redeems. Tinkerbell angels, grandma angels, sexy angels; floating firemen, firemen's widows', firemen's widows smiling, angel-inspired babies; an entire ocean transubstantiated into an American flag. Madalone's music video takes a long time to download, but open two windows so you can read all about it while you wait. On the "about" page, scrolling behind pictures of Madalone buried beneath cats and dogs, we learn that he is stunt coordinator and stuntman for numerous Star Trek spin-off shows, and "is also featured on the Star Trek Trading Cards, which in the trading card world is a high honor, and a valuable collectible." And to think: We stand as one with such a man. [ Continue reading: ] Always Make War by Proxy So apparently the memo -- the error-riddled one outlining GOP "talking points" for cashing in on the Terry Schiavo controversy with pro-life voters -- was real, with the caveats that the "working draft" was never meant to be printed by... [ Continue reading: ] Moralistic Therapeutic Deism Scott Korb: They are not running away. They are not rebelling. They may not actually know, or be able to articulate, what they believe, but almost every one of them -- ninety-seven per cent -- believes in God. The vast majority of them -- like the vast majority of us -- are Christians. Very few are what might be called spiritual seekers; hardly any of them know what it means to say (or be) "spiritual but not religious." When prompted, nearly all of them speak positively about religion, yet with each other they hardly ever talk -- much less argue -- about it at all. They are conventional and, according to Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, they "may actually serve as a very accurate barometer of the condition of the culture and institutions of our larger society. Far from being alien creatures from another planet, American teenagers actually well reflect back to us the best and worst of our own adult condition and culture." [ Continue reading: ] Christian Legal Society An Illinois chapter of the Christian Legal Society, a law student group that requires its members to "adhere to Christian beliefs" -- i.e., not be gay -- has sued Southern Illinois University for revoking its official school recognition March 25.... [ Continue reading: ]  Half-Mast France's decision to fly flags at half-mast yesterday and on Friday in honor of the pope has caused a public debate, with some critics accusing the government of violating the country's commitment to secularism and of following a double-standard on... [ Continue reading: ] Myth-Making in the Fullness of Time By Kate Hawley: Less than a week after his death, it’s impossible not to be numbed by the relentless sameness of network TV news’ Pope talking points. We get the biography so simple it seems the stuff of folklore, followed by his battles with Communism, Liberation Theology, the sins of our material culture and, finally, Parkinson’s. It’s tough to produce a deeply felt, personal story about a man whose life was defined by an institution, and obituaries are hardly vehicles for originality, especially those about people who have carefully cultivated their public personas. The Pope, like Ronald Reagan (also a supposed defeater of Communism) is less a man than a myth. [ Continue reading: ] Not Much to Say Reporters have been calling to find out what The Revealer has to say about the death of the pope. Not too much, we tell them. The Philadelphia Inquirer's Rome correspondent, Ken Dilanian, accepted that as a fair answer and ran... [ Continue reading: ]  Back to the Retail Fold Time was when poor churches rented retail space in malls and storefronts because their congregations were unable to buy or build churches of their own. Not so anymore, at least in Wasilla, Alaska, where the Crossroads Community Church -- a... [ Continue reading: ]  Christianity Without God Adding to the young discourse on megachurches in exurbia, former religion editor and author of A Turbulent Peace: The Psalms for Our Time, Ray Waddle, traces today's rapidly growing megachurches back to a short-lived theological movement in the 1960s called... [ Continue reading: ] Other People's Holidays The San Antonio Express-News experiments with a new strategy for overthrowing the country's secular overlords: make atheists look like a pack of sad lonely hearts who weren't invited to the believers' ball. In one of the saddest ten-second sketches of... [ Continue reading: ] Good Coverage and Good Press We're pretty juvenile here at The Revealer, and we get jealous when a lot of other people start nosing into our territory by badmouthing the media's lapses in covering religious news. So now that calling the media religiously illiterate is... [ Continue reading: ] Kansas Ban Kansas is gearing up for its very own gay marriage ban with poster campaigns, neighborly division, a "Mayday for Marriage" rally and more than $135,000 in out-of-state money. The campaign supporting Kansas' proposed ban -- one of the strictest in... [ Continue reading: ] The Non-Traditional Body of Christ Gene Robinson, the openly gay Anglican Bishop whose consecration is at the heart of the Communion's current divisions, has again outraged conservatives in the Church with recent remarks challenging the supremacy of nuclear families that were interpreted as a claim... [ Continue reading: ]  Written on the Body Sharlet: I have very little to add to the media storm following John Paul II's death this afternoon. I was addressing a meeting of Gegrapha, a Christian journalists association (of which I'm not a member) at the New York Evangelical Seminary. We were alerted to the death by the sound of bells, followed by bagpipes -- very traditional religious media. The group paused and said a prayer for the pope; and I was surprised for a moment by how sad it made me. I'm rarely saddened by the deaths of public figures, especially those who are very old. And I have no special love for the pope, nor any spiritual connection to his authority; indeed, I dread the inevitable tributes which will claim that the pope defeated communism, a mass public exercise in bad history. But the bells that marked his death also gave voice to the sentiments of those who mourn his passing, more effectively than most do themselves. The bells distilled what about the pope made all those Catholics who didn't live according to his dictates, who suffered for them, mourn anyway: the sound of great bells is collective, that of an instrument too grand for any one person to make on his own, a beautiful noise that has for centuries reshaped the flow of time, marked the mundane as sacred, at least to someone. The bells announce: Someone has lost something sacred... [ Continue reading: ] Last Papal Picture Show Peter Manseau, author of the forthcoming Vows, a memoir of his Catholic priest father and his mother the nun, writes on the big daddy of his family: "During my first year of college, I had a pope fixation. I never went to church in those days, and I was not yet a religion major, so the reasons behind my preoccupation were neither pious nor academic. There was just an unnamable something that drew me to the image of the man. When my dormitory roommate taped to one of our shared cinderblock walls an enormous poster of a woman in a bikini and roller blades, I countered with the biggest picture I could find of John Paul II in his prime. Dressed in a snow white soutane, his face tan with travel, the new, young pope -- “God’s athlete,” he was called back then -- stood above St. Peter’s Square with his arms outstretched in blessing. I hung the photograph not as moral rebuke of my roommate’s decorative taste but as simple contrast -- if he insisted on being boorish in one direction, I would answer equally in the other. When my roommate put up a second poster in response -- different woman, same outfit; this time on the ceiling above his bed -- I complained that people could see his rollerblading ladies through the window. 'It just makes us look stupid,' I told him, 'like dumb frat guys.' 'Well, people can see the pope, too,' he said. 'How does that make us look?'" Read more of "The Last Papal Picture Show" at Killing the Buddha. [ Continue reading: ]  Convicted Matthew Moran: "I looked at Mark and wondered silently. Wondered if we would be making proclamations about faith and new beginnings the next time Mark was sent upstate. I had interacted with him too much to make any proclamations. I had listened to his rambling monologues and knew that in Mark’s world, the universe could tilt upside down or right-side up in a weekend or less. He is the only person I know that could be suicidal on Friday and bring a friend to church on Sunday. It made me wonder what seeing with 'eyes of faith' actually looked like. Does being Christian mean that we are required to be optimists?" At Killing the Buddha. [ Continue reading: ] You're Persecuted? No, I'm Persecuted On Thursday, a Seattle jury convicted three young men from northern Washington of assault and committing a hate crime for savagely beating Micah Painter with a beer bottle last June because Painter is gay. So reports the city's major daily, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, with a few added notes on the jury -- half of which wished it could deliver a stronger sentence -- and the implications of the verdict for the state's pending gay-rights bill. The tidiness and brevity of the PI's report is apparently par for the course in the media treatment of this case, according to Eli Sanders of Seattle's alternative weekly, The Stranger, who notes that when the story has been covered at all, it has been cast as a clash of culture-war opposites, an ugly enactment of the dispute between rural and urban America, between straights and gays. But in a hefty investigation of the case -- exceptional for the depth of its reporting, the sharpness of its writing, and its able grasp of history -- Sanders presents a far more complicated picture of both Painter, a once-promising gymnist who fell into drug-use and prostitution after running away from alleged physical abuse at the hands of his evangelical preacher father, and his attackers, all Russian and Ukrainian evangelical immigrants whose families came to America in the '80s and '90s as part of the exodus of evangelical Christians fleeing Soviet persecution, and who were simultaneously committed members of their Slavic Baptist church in Bellingham, WA, and wild, heavy-drinking kids who frequently ran afoul of the law. [ Continue reading: ] Flirting With Mob Morality There's nothing like being exposed to national ridicule by The New York Times to make a science museum rediscover its educational obligations to the community. Not two weeks after the Times reported on the decision of several southern Imax theaters... [ Continue reading: ] |