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France’s ban on wearing hajib in public schools is, I think, one of the least constructive ways to respond to the issue of Muslim immigration into Europe. It’s rather like banning all public reading from the Qur’an because of Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric.
All right, time for another friendly straw poll: If an article mentions David “Moses” Berg or his movement known as the Children of God (later The Family), what words would you expect to see?
Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times has written a 1,400-word article that uses the word fundamentalism 15 times–and never in a way that qualifies her report for GetReligion’s Creeping Fundamentalism file of hysterical or misleading stories.
In one of the most illuminating passages in his autobiography, Here I Stand, retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong recalls the strict environment of his childhood:
ÃÆâÃâÃâ¬Ãââ The Guardian reports on a harmonic convergence of weirdness known as Jerry Springer: The Opera:
Hanna Rosin of The Washington Post has written a fairly good analysis for The Atlantic of religious believers’ role in the 2004 election. The central insight of the essay comes in this remark from Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission: “I’ve got more in common with Pope John Paul II than I do with Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton.”
William J. Stuntz, whose “Faculty Clubs and Church Pews” essay drew a year-end endorsement from New York Times columnist David Brooks, now lists the issues on which he believes the secular left and the Christian right may cooperate: abortion, poverty at home, poverty abroad and spreading freedom/nation building.
The editors of Arts & Letters Daily state it bluntly: “If God is God, he’s not good. If God is good, he’s not God. You can’t have it both ways, especially not after the Indian Ocean catastrophe.”
Here’s a quick way to take the theological pulse of churchgoers. Imagine you’re attending an urban parish with a reputation for liberal theology and political activism. Your new senior pastor begins the Lord’s Prayer with “Our Mother and Father in heaven,” baptizes children in the name of “the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sustainer,” attends an anti-war rally in Washington and offers unequivocal support when the associate pastor announces from the pulpit that she is a lesbian.
