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Two strands of Christianity battle against a bill ensuring that all Americans are cared for. One prefers John Locke to Jesus while the other has its issues with women.

From traders rubbing the testicles of the New York Stock Exchange’s Golden Bull to the pantheon of saints, soothsayers and heretics who haunt it, the Free Market has earned its status as a cult.

Aspiring New York City councilman Dan Halloran is a practicing Neopagan, more specifically a Heathen, devoted to the religious practices and beliefs of early Northern Europe. But the oddest thing of all, to many people, is that he’s not an anti-war, enviro-activist, free-loving liberal—he’s a Republican.

The author of a new book talks to RD about the radical that lies beneath our everyday practices, whether ethics requires religion, and the “education of desire.”

Last week, Lisa Miller, religion writer and editor ( Newsweek and the Washington Post) filed an op-ed in which she fulminated against “the left” and journalists who have raised concerns about the influence of dominionist thinkers on Republican presidential candidates like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.

By the time this book tour is finished, she will have succeeded in splitting the republican party, solidifying a new hard right religious base, and making enough money to turn Alaska into the New Jerusalem.

While the family of a 9-year-old incest victim’s abortion is excommunicated, the perpetrator never even made it to the ecclesial radar screen. Let this case signal the end of any credible claim to authority of bishops and the dawn of a new era when local communities determine their own members. I daresay the world will be a safer, kinder place.

Ruth Madoff, the disgraced financier’s wife, loved the theater, and a particularly lavish version of the American Dream. But her sleep, and ours, is not so easy now.

An online novel about a flu pandemic blurs the boundaries between real “flu-blogging” and the dystopic world of its blogger protagonist. And it exposes the cultural anxiety, both religious and secular, that disease unleashes.

With his new Faith and Freedom Coalition, Ralph Reed hopes to simultaneously bury his past and to make the connection he’s been yearning for: to “address a wider range agenda, social issues plus economic issues.” Will that connection and mutual cries of socialism be enough to wed the two most energetic right-wing movements?