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   Access Holywood Lilly Fowler: The New York Times’ report on the work done by the Monastery of the Angels in Hollywood is an attention grabber. Despite recent efforts to target Christian audiences with its films, Hollywood retains its image as a place incongruent with the quiet, religious life. Yet while readers might turn to “For 56 Years, Battling Evils of Hollywood with Prayer” because they are curious about the place of religion in a supposedly godless town, it is the glaringly insincere tone of the article they will remember.... [ Continue reading: ] Not Quiet on the Western Front The Revealer Goes Bicoastal, Again By Peter Manseau A few years ago, when Revealer editor Jeff Sharlet and I were touring in support of our book, Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, we spent just enough time in San Francisco to meet the quintessential West Coast media man. No, not David Geffen -- Diamond Dave Whittaker. A radio talk show host, Rainbow Family elder, and aging beatnik often mistaken for a hippie gone gray, Diamond Dave told us that his one claim to fame was that he had turned Bob Dylan on to pot. He was being modest; in fact, the man is a walking monument to the counter culture, as likely to be stopped on the street by a dreadlocked white girl from Marin County as by an African-American businessman with a Black Panther beret in his past. His philosophy and his life were summed up best by a mantra he repeated at every opportunity. “Cast a wide net,” he liked to say, “and find a common thread.” Yet to call Diamond Dave “quintessentially” West Coast is not to support the usual stodgy vs. trippy bicoastal dialectic. Rather, it is simply to say you’d be hard pressed to find someone similar on the other side of the country... [ Continue reading: ]  How To Tell If You're Intelligelical Evangelicalism plus eggheadery equals, apparently, "intelligelicals," and so far as we can tell from this intelligelical anti-intelligical rant, they're making omelettes. What the hell are we talking about? We don't know, and this article probably won't help, but if you... [ Continue reading: ]  Radio Provocation The folks at Provoke Radio, a left Catholic program out of Baltimore, asked The Revealer for a link. We were skeptical. But the show is good! Regular Revealer readers know that we're skeptical of the "religious left" -- not its goals, but its potential, usually undermined by flakiness and lousy production values. Provoke--an excellent name--sounds to us like a model for small-scale progressive broadcasting. The mission statement gets mushy--what are the "principles we all share"?--but the program, hosted by Fr. Stephen Spahn, a young Jesuit priest with a great radio voice, is specific, tough, and intelligent. Part of what makes it good is its recognition that religious questions are also often economic questions, and that problems ranging from genocide in Sudan to the abandonment of a generation in underfunded schools demand more than faith and good intentions. [ Continue reading: ] Searching for Sufis Jill Hamburg Coplan: Through the centuries, wherever Sufism held sway -- like Ottoman Turkey -- Jews could find safe haven. If I could find a Sufi, I thought, I could approach him with genuine respect, bringing my own real curiosity about mysticism, and produce for American newspaper readers a kind of encounter that might help them understand Islam in a different way than a demonizing story about a radical hostage-taker or half-crazed suicide attacker ever could. And if not, well, Judaism reserves its mystical texts and practices for old male scholars who've mastered everything else. Perhaps the more tolerant Sufis would open a door for me... [ Continue reading: ] Fall Events The fall line-up of events at our host institution, NYU's Center for Religion and Media. General interest journalists may be most interested in a panel discussion on "Gods Elect? Religion, Media and Elections in the Americas." We're looking forward to... [ Continue reading: ] Arctic Idol Iconoclash: "Christian zealots destroy ancient Arctic petroglyphs."... [ Continue reading: ]  Hard-To-Get Christians Liberal bloggers will no doubt embrace the news that conservative Christians are losing faith in the Republican Party... [ Continue reading: ]  His God Doesn't Hate Fags Kate Hawley: "It isn’t often that someone like Andrew Marin--a self-described straight, white, evangelical conservative--goes into the heart of a liberal enclave and receives a benediction from the nation’s largest gay rights organization." [ Continue reading: ]  Threatened With a Baseball Bat In an effort to curb sexual temptation among the staff at Saddleback and other churches, Rick Warren has posted fifteen specific rules for upkeeping moral integrity at pastors.org. Although a preoccupation with this issue is widespread among evangelicals, Warren's "Thou... [ Continue reading: ]  The New Christian Zionism Nicole Greenfield: Max Blumenthal comments on David Brog as Washington's first full-time lobbyist for Christian Zionists--specifically for John Hagee's Christians United for Israel--in a web-only piece for The Nation. [ Continue reading: ] |