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   Thanks for Lying Obama's powerhouse pastor, Jeremiah Wright, talks back to The New York Times' Jodi Kantor: "Thank you for engaging in one of the biggest misrepresentations of the truth I have ever seen in sixty-five years," opens Wright, and then he gets... [ Continue reading: ] Hanging Ramadan Patrick Cockburn in Kirkuk adds frightening context to the mainstream media reports on Tuesday's execution of Saddam's VP, Taha Yassin Ramadan, at the leftist website CounterPunch. We've been following Cockburn for awhile, and consider his reports essential for understanding Iraq.... [ Continue reading: ] Born Free? Kathryn Joyce on Southern Baptist big Al Mohler's Brave New World... [ Continue reading: ]  We Don't Need No Education! Jon Stewart talks to Boston University Religious Studies Chair Steve Prothero about religious literacy: Prothero apparently thinks it'd be a good idea for American students, and even American politicians. Doesn't this dude know we're living in the space age? How could understanding the difference between a Sunni and a Shia possibly effect our modern world? Watch the show to find out. Or, better yet, buy the book. [ Continue reading: ]  Dictatorship Is For Other People In the Forward, Yossi Alpher says the U.S. must swallow hard, buck up, and install a puppet dictator in Iraq. Because that always turns out well. But Alpher, a former senior advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, is brave... [ Continue reading: ] The Colorful Apocalypse On The Revealer's sister site, Killing the Buddha: Greg Bottoms set out on the quest that resulted in his new book, The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art, with his schizophrenic brother -- driven by visions to Christian fundamentalism -- in mind. But he doesn't pathologize the religious art that he finds, or fetishize it as sacred kitsch, or succumb to its theology. Instead, he takes Revelation seriously. [ Continue reading: ]  Faith-Based Democrats? The Winter 2007 issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin is an especially good issue of a magazine that ranges between liberally pious, bland, and brilliant. This edition contains much that's in the third category, but only one short piece out of the three I'd planned to link to is online... [ Continue reading: ] NYT: Lenin Gay? Wink, Wink “When he thunders his dogma," wrote the cartoonist Robert Minor in 1918, "one sees the fighting Lenin. He is iron. He is political Calvin.” The New York Times reports that the Communist Party USA has just donated its massive archives... [ Continue reading: ] Say It Ain’t So! Harper San Francisco—Now a HO? John D. Spalding Publishers Weekly reports that Harper San Francisco has changed its name to Harper One. The reason? [ Continue reading: ]  Captain America, Murdered Mensch WNYC's "On the Media" interviews Captain America's 93-year-old creator, Joe Simon, who's sitting shiva for the murdered hero. Which raises the question, Was Cap, born to Irish immigrants on the Lower East Side in 1917, secretly Jewish?... [ Continue reading: ] Switching for Success The press is portraying Mitt Romney as an opportunistic flip-flopper for his newly-minted anti-abortion views, and pundits wonder if such crass recalibration will end his political career. But The L.A. Times' Janet Hook notes that Romney is in fact part... [ Continue reading: ] Is Terabithia a Christian Nation? "Safety and faith are different things," Katherine Patterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia tells Christianity Today, rejecting the "safe for children" interpretation of religion and art... [ Continue reading: ] Bono For Sale From Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine, we learn that Bono has a new book coming from the conservative W Publishing Group. It's 64 pages, Bono's snapshots of Africa ("Africa is sexy" he informs us) interspersed with the text of his 2006 address to the National Prayer Breakfast. From both lefty CounterPunch and not-so-lefty Advertising Age, meanwhile, we learn that Bono may be peddling bullshit... [ Continue reading: ]  A Marriage Made in Heaven? Peter Manseau: One evening just before Christmas, in a modest, two-bedroom apartment on 16th Street in Northwest Washington, the most controversial clergyman in the recent history of the Roman Catholic Church took a moment to sing me a song... [ Continue reading: ]  Amongst White Clouds Friday, March 9: The Center for Religion and Media presents a New York screening and discussion of Amongst White Clouds, a journey into the hidden tradition of China’s Buddhist hermit monks living in scattered retreats dotting China's Zhongnan Mountain range raises questions about their former marginalization, and current rediscovery, as religious practices revive in the People’s Republic. A discussion between filmmaker Edward Burger and anthropologist Angela Zito will follow the screening. Details... [ Continue reading: ] Follow the Golf Ball If you can't follow the money, take a tour of the real estate. That's what Joe Feuerherd did when the Roman Catholic archiocese of Detroit stonewalled his requests for more information about the investors who made its new luxury hotel... [ Continue reading: ]  He Shall Rise Again! (Or Not.) Not sure if I'm alluding to the South or Jesus there, or if there's really a difference, but anyway, what I'm really talking about is the pulp myth known as Captain America, shot down dead on the courthouse steps as he prepared to fight for civil liberties, the boring legal way. As American resurrection myths go, superheroes are in a distant third place behind the South and the savior, but that's not bad -- the death of a hero, even an imaginary one, probably resonates longer and in more subtle ways than the decline or departure of any baseball franchise but the Brooklyn Dodgers. Captain America killed? That's news, and The New York Times thinks so, too... [ Continue reading: ] Cannibals and Heretics Global warming causes cannibalism in polar bears, say scientists. Things are heating up at the National Association of Evangelicals, too, and Christian conservatives are getting hungry for their own.  Heebie-Jeebies! Steve Beeber, author of The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, asks: Was punk good for the Jews? [ Continue reading: ] Leave Ted Haggard Alone Sharlet: The NYT reports today on more trouble for Ted Haggard's Colorado Springs New Life megachurch, forced to lay off staff following a decline in giving in response to Haggard's meth-fueled gay sex scandal. The Times' report is a weak little story, suggesting a straightfoward connection between the decline and Haggard's fall. That's no doubt part of it, but let's give credit where it's due... [ Continue reading: ] Religion As Race Perhaps American anxieties over the possibility of a black president are being played out not through discussion of race, but religion. First there was the media myth that Obama was a Muslim because his father was, the "responsible" version of... [ Continue reading: ] Does Obama Hate Yiddish? Four questions about today's report on growing tensions over Obama's disinvitation of his pastor from his presidential announcement. 1. Why did Ben Wallace-Wells' superb and exciting description of said pastor in Rolling Stone freak out Obama's people, as reported by... [ Continue reading: ]  Whose Bones? Jesus' bones? Whatever. Peter Manseau is talking about your bones and the mysteries of faith on the Long Island Expressway.... [ Continue reading: ] Jewish Encounters With the Christian Right Sharlet: I'll be joining four other Jewish journalists for a panel discussion, "Jewish Encounters With the Christian Right," sponsored by Makor and the 92nd St. Y., on Wed., March 14, a 7 pm. [ Continue reading: ] Religious Literacy It's a credit to our friend Steve Prothero's new book, Religious Literacy, an exploration of the subject and argument for religious studies education, that it wins a very positive review in The Washington Post Book World from Susan Jacoby, the... [ Continue reading: ] Blowing the Whistle on Wade Horn A high-ranking cabinet official in charge of $47 billion in funds decides to toss a million bucks to an organization he started in his kitchen. Said organization espouses radically controversial views disputed by many scientists. Sound like a story? [ Continue reading: ] In Character Gets Some Mark Oppenheimer: "When politicians have to belong to churches, and when religion journalists seem to write only about churches, we can feel pressured to join up, sign on the dotted line, profess allegiance. Or, in our refusal to, we can be unwittingly pushed into a camp of extreme atheism that actually is no more comfortable. Most of us are somewhere between camps: pious one day, sentimental the next, skeptical on alternate Sabbaths." [ Continue reading: ]  Ah, Just Don't F*ck With Anybody Harper's has just posted the first part of investigative reporter Ken Silverstein's March cover story, "Parties of God: The Bush Doctrine and the rise of Islamic democracy." But the portion posted might as well have been titled, "Don't F*ck With... [ Continue reading: ]  "Don't f*ck with the Jews" Sharlet: John Derbyshire, of The National Review, on lessons for young pundits: "Almost the first thing you hear from old hands when you go into opinion journalism in the U.S. is, to put it in the precise form I first... [ Continue reading: ] Not Even Solomon Could Solve It A Polish P.I. and his sidekick, a rat named Watson, attempt to solve the Case of the Meaning of Life in "Essence," a graphic novel by Grzegorz Janusz and Krysztof Gawronkiewicz translated and excerpted in Words Without Borders' fantastic new comics edition. Words Without Borders is worth a bookmark -- a brilliant online magazine of translated stories, poems, and now comics from around the world. [ Continue reading: ] Moral Piggy-Backing At Talk2Action, an activist-oriented news site about the Christian Right, The Revealer's Kathryn Joyce examines the Christian Right's "moral piggy-backing" on the new William Wilberforce biopic, Amazing Grace.... [ Continue reading: ] Tune In, Turn On Sharlet: Maybe it's not money that corrupts, it's media. Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Paul Crouch and his Trinity Broadcasting Network, Ted Haggard, erstwhile media darling, and now Pastor Mike Kestler, the man behind the Calvary Satellite Network. There's something about... [ Continue reading: ] A New Front in the Abortion Wars Some journalists will look on "UNdoing Reproductive Freedom: Christian Right NGOs Target the United Nations" with skepticism for its provenance in an unabashedly liberal think tank. That's fine, but read the report, anyway -- this is a major underreported story. Why? Maybe because most reporters assume the internationalism of the United Nations mirrors standard issue liberal politics in the U.S. Maybe because the U.N. only makes the papers when there's an issue of war and peace at hand. Maybe because fifty years of right wing agitation have successfully produced a mainstream master narrative about the U.N. as irrelevant. Of course, all too often the U.N. is irrelevant; but not always, as these anti-abortion activists understand. [ Continue reading: ] |