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Lila Rose, a 20-year-old UCLA student, is taking on Planned Parenthood with a phony story, video equipment, and support from a host of Christian Right media outlets and organizations.

The vision of justice and political progress that reigns in American culture and progressive religious circles is one of restoring the individual’s dignity, which imagines the individual—even as a member of a community—as somehow whole. This vision of wholeness, however, often has to function differentially: for my wholeness to be meaningful, then someone somewhere, if only imaginatively and fantastically, has to be understood as lacking wholeness, as needing restoration.

What’s a white racist to do these days? A new book examines the history of white nationalism as it has moved from the fringe to the mainstream, describes the religious roots of the movement, and alerts us to its political and social goals.

On the “God-spot,” the psycho-phone, and mapping the mystical brain.

It was a hot summer for the Family, the exclusive conservative Christian group with designs on DC power—three politicians with ties to their C Street headquarters were caught in sex scandals. Jeff Sharlet, author of the definitive book on the secretive group, talks with us about the flickering media spotlight, and the future of the Family.

Since the fall of Secularization Theory, which claimed that belief in God would slowly recede in the face of science and technology, we still must ask: Is there a future for formal, organized, institutionalized religion as we presently recognize it in rapidly globalizing, postindustrial and postmodern world? Here’s what religion will have to do for humans to survive and flourish.

The Employee Free Choice Act will go a long way toward expanding workplace democracy. Progressive religious leaders, whatever their disagreements might be, must come together to support the restoring of dignity to those who labor honestly.

Plus: Bill Maher’s “Christian Bashing”; African-American support for Prop. 8 exaggerated; Trouble in Narnialand and Worst anti-Gay voices

If China becomes a new priority, an economic beacon and a political patron, what happens to the question of reconciling Islam and the West? Two new books offer groundbreaking approaches to this and other unexpected questions.

The Vatican’s Web site considers a patron saint of the internet, Muslims debate divorce by text, and Jews pray by email; How does the inevitable transition to the virtual realm affect religious experience across the world?