Christian Right

Time magazine’s June 11 article “Does God Want You to Be Thin?” celebrates Rick Warren’s faith-based weight loss initiative, with barely a mention of the conservative evangelical pastor’s homophobic teachings. While the “Daniel Plan” and Rick Warren’s incredible shrinking waistline receive five pages of gushing praise, Time glosses over the fact that this “inclusive” plan–open to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, too–mixes getting-in-shape advice with condemnations of sexuality that deviates from Warren’s expectations of normative heterosexuality and sexual identity.

What ought we do about millennial thinking in our day? If the combined 1300 pages of these two books have taught me anything, it’s that we can’t make it just go away. There is something fascinating, and perverse, in the human psyche that seems to yearn for this world to be other than how it is, even if that means destroying it.

Theologically and politically, Romney parted ways with LDS views on Islam and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Rather than attributing Holmes’ and the Joker’s nonexistent moral compass (and neither seems to have one) to an absence of moral training that would be there if prayer were back in public schools, we may need to look at their apparent lack of a self-conscious narrative as a more telling source.

Will Romney want to talk about LDS Temples being modeled on Solomon’s?

Probably few who gathered to hear Bonhoeffer’s latest biographer expected to be asked to imagine themselves called by God to rise up against a regime that might be as heinous as the Third Reich—but as it turns out Metaxas is not unique among religious-right intellectuals in his use of the language of armed revolt.

Legitimizing questions about Obama and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Who is the “we” Bruni is listening to?

Even Republicans can’t stomach her Islamophobic conspiracy theories.

Secular intellectuals are your friends too.