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Jeffress thinks it’s fine to interrogate candidates’ religious beliefs. Indeed there may be times when it is legitimate to ask whether a candidate’s religious positions would have a direct impact on policy. Religious Right activist David Barton has declared that the Bible is opposed to progressive taxation, capital gains taxes, collective bargaining, and the minimum wage. It’s legitimate to ask whether candidates who praise Barton’s work—such as Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich—share those opinions. Similarly, when a presidential candidate like Bachmann calls a Christian Reconstructionist thinker her “mentor,” it is not religious bigotry to ask whether she shares his views about the Constitution and the roles of religion and government in society. But questioning the authenticity or soundness of a candidate’s religious views, for example to have Barton and Glenn Beck rail against what they believe are President Obama’s religious views on the nature of salvation, seems far less appropriate—or useful.

The desire to translate events like Qaddafi’s death into video games is an attempt to simplify complex issues into patterns that we can recognize and make sense of, with predictable rules, defeatable “bad guys,” and the hopeful celebration of an “epic win.”

When I heard the goals for this year’s massive prayer rally—healing America in a time of crisis, accomplishing racial reconciliation, repairing Detroit, and (here’s the part where I come in) bringing Jesus to Muslim hearts—I figured a Muslim in the crowd could be a nice twist. My plan was to report from the inside, to talk to the attendees as one among devoted thousands. I’d try to understand how such Christians understand Islam, for Lou Engle’s world is alien from my New England roots and New York life. I’d attended churches before, but nothing like this.

Left or Right, the market always seems to win. This is actually where I would locate the greater threat to Arab democracy, and the temptation to slide into some form of authoritarianism, older or newer. As the people of the region confront the reality that they have little say over economic policy, and will be forced to accede to the contingencies of global capitalism, they may well become immensely frustrated by the scale of change and demand something different. Considering how volatile European and American politics have become, and how frequently we now see street protests and even supposedly stable and demure countries, how much more so these new democracies?

Conversion, magic, flogging, the New Third World, Muslim philosophy, Malcolm. Compelling reading, in any year.

While a valiant effort at a compassionate depiction of individuals swept up in the horror of the Bosnian Genocide, Angelina Jolie’s main character, Danijel, simply ends up humanizing genocide.

New poll shows greater evangelical suspicion of Obama’s religion, evolution, and interracial marriage.

While president Bashir has remained clear about his vision of Islamic nationalism, the conflict can’t be reduced to Muslim persecution of Christians. The broad struggle is of state-sponsored Arabist Islamic nationalism against racial and religious pluralism.

After two years of planning and development, “ The Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam” was launched this week. But the project does not come without hope and expectation in this post-9/11 era.

What the anxious West has failed to recognize in the Arab Spring is that the political transformations of the Middle East are the coming of age of a new Islamism.