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The Republican Party appears to be going the way of Tertullian who insisted that the true Christian must prove his or her bona fides by believing what is literally unbelievable.

In 1973, a group of Jewish gay people—mostly men—gathered in New York City and created what eventually became Congregation Beit Simchat Torah. In the decades since then, the organization has burgeoned. The congregation is also known to some—perhaps many—because of an ethnography undertaken by an Israeli anthropologist who specialized in migration, but became intrigued with the congregation when in New York. Moshe Shokeid, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, wrote A Gay Synagogue in New York, a study based on participant observation and interviews with congregants in 1989.

Last time pro wrestling mogul Linda McMahon sought Connecticut’s senate seat her opponents used WWE connections to steroids and displays of sex and sexism to attack her. But if you want to make headway with the US electorate there’s a much better avenue depicted on the wrestling stage: religion.

As largely secular protests to “Occupy Wall Street” advance in fits and starts, capitalism and church negotiate to bring the best of both to bear on the world’s most intractable problems. Except, not quite.

In 1986, Judith C. Brown published a book about Renaissance Italy called Immodest Acts. It was reviewed in the New York Times, The Nation, and the San Francisco Chronicle, not to mention many scholarly venues. Why? Perhaps because the subtitle of the book was The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy.

The book is at once a rich, humorous history of comics, a political commentary on the absurdities of conservative British and American culture, and a deeply personal memoir. The relevant moments for us here involve those in a Kathmandu hotel room just after the writer had visited a Tantric Buddhist temple. As Morrison chills on the roof of the Vajra Hotel, he sees the temple come alive and begin to rear up like one of those living sports cars in the Transformers movies…

RD talks with journalist Amy Waldman whose first novel, The Submission, presciently imagines a controversy, set in post-9/11 New York City, in which the design of a Muslim-American wins a contest to build a 9/11 memorial.

A new book shows how a cohort of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews altered the nation; from the Social Gospel movement through anti-Communism, Civil Rights and even into the rise of the religious right.

He wrote to his mother, saying, more or less, Jesus was only a man and a man is on his own. It’s clear that there was a lot of anguish in that decision. If anything, untethering his conscience from religion put more pressure on him to prove himself and his sincerity. When Evan was manacled to the bars of his cell in Fort Leavenworth because of his absolute refusal to serve the army, his friend (and President Wilson’s son-in-law’s brother) John Nevin Sayre went to Wilson on his behalf and repeatedly described Evan to Wilson as Christ-like. Evan would have hated that description, but clearly part of him wanted that and needed that kind of commitment.

When Anders Breivik slaughtered over 70 people in Norway last month, he did so in the name of the Knights Templar. Known for their extreme violence, this was the Roman Catholic crusading fraternity dedicated to the protection of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. Medieval military orders do not commonly hit the headlines, but oddly—as was noted in the Christian Science Monitor in late July—the Knights Templar were also implicated in another context, in another country, the same week that Breivik’s Manifesto began to circulate.