In Seattle, self-described “charismatic Calvinist” Mark Driscoll preaches that “Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand, and the willingness to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worshipÂ…I cannot worship a guy I can
Ridiculous, and worse. So say the new atheist books: In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens does not mince words, calling religion “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive
National Public Radio recently aired a series on children who suffer from what some psychologists call a gender identity disorder, also known as transgenderism. The children believe they have been born into the wrong biological body. It is not that the child wants to “become”
Decades ago an Atlantic editor suggested an idea for an article which I somehow failed to produce. I recall him saying that the magazine rarely covered religion, but when it did, as it had in a recent feature article, it quickened an enormous response. Today,
There is a small church based in Topeka, Kansas , consisting primarily of a founder and his many children. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Members claim to have proclaimed their message in all fifty states: It is too late to pray for the good of
Imagine the Hollywood pitch meeting: Producers try to convince cable television executives to green light a new series about a burned out Oklahoma City homicide detective named Grace. She smokes, drinks, swears, looks for love in all the wrong places, and is played by Holly
This is the 369th M.E.M. Sightings (archived since 1999). At forty lines each, that means there have been 14,720 lines, only seven of which — in a 2001 and a 2005 column — were devoted to Jerry Falwell. Our calculators tell us this means he
Banners currently hanging from several Australian churches feature the words “Jesus Loves Osama” against a camouflage background. These splashy “advertisements” have been generating headlines, stirring the public, and drawing comment from political and religious leaders. Prime Minister John Howard claimed to “understand the Christian motivation”
Columnist David Kuo’s book Tempting Faith will rival, on a smaller scale, Bob Woodward’s State of Denial as a disturber of the peace. “Smaller scale” does not mean “small scale,” since its accusations and revelations refer to the way the cohort of evangelical supporters and
In Godless, her latest and most ill-tempered book-length rant, Ann Coulter asserts that liberalism is a “godless” religion. In fact, however, the most fundamental problem in Christianity in America and the world today is that the “fundamentalist” religion that most loudly proclaims itself to be