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The Gainesville event might be the final culmination of the age of hijackers, where a small group’s manipulation of a powerful vehicle has far-reaching disastrous effects. Only in this case, the vehicle is the Qur’an, not an airplane. And the manipulation need only be virtual. Never has book burning been so effective without even occurring. Symbolic actions on the internet and their consequences in the real world now occur almost simultaneously. And the threat of a symbolic gesture and an actual one become one and the same.

By bringing young Haredi men into contact with the permanent emergency that is Israeli civil society, volunteer organizations and the Israeli Army have brought these young men into contact with the world of physical violence, aggression, and gun use. Hitherto protected by their insularity and separateness from Israeli society, these ultra-Orthodox males are becoming socialized to Israeli norms. And they and their community are paying a heavy price for that socialization.

The counter-protestors were a motley bunch. A father with a son deployed to Afghanistan; some white American teens upset at the burning of the Qur’an nearby; and two twenty-something girls—who think it’s “just terrible” to burn an American flag which has also set…

Conscience collides with censorship at BYU, as Mormons struggle to come to terms with the legacy of Proposition 8.

We must listen to our neighbors.

A month ago ten humanitarian aid workers in Afghanistan, most of them apparently called to medical mission by a deep Christian faith, were massacred by the Taliban. The New York Times’ front-page caption beneath their pictures read: “Humanitarian Victims of Afghan…

As a thirty-something evangelical, I find myself in a crisis of vocational and spiritual bearing. I wouldn’t quite call it a traditional crisis of faith or of existential being. I still believe, but can’t relate with the embattled and politicized state of the current evangelical…

One of the strange aspects of broadcaster Glenn Beck’s recent moves to transform himself into a religious leader as well as entertainer and “educator” has been his intense attacks on President Obama’s theology of salvation, which he has called “evil” and “satanic.”

And everywhere there is food.

When I started reading it the whole universe unfolded before me.