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Religion and Public Life With Mark Silk

It went down this way. Rev. Terry Jones heard from the Lord that all those excellent reasons for burning a Koran should be waived if and only if Cordoba House (aka Park51, aka the Mosque of Doom) is moved a few blocks uptown, lest the practice of Islam (“from the Devil,” in the theology of…

OK, I admit it. I know Dan Pipes. I used to be a friend of Dan Pipes. True, he did once threaten to make my life difficult. My sin? Disrespecting Dan Pipes in print. I called him “an independent scholar.” Worse, I claimed that his dire warnings that many American Muslims want to turn the…

What’s scary about the satirical website Christwire is imagining how many people who ran its page views up to 27 million in August actually take it seriously. “A close reader of ChristWire will soon figure out (one hopes) that the site is not serious,” Mark Oppenheimer wrote in his New York Times “Beliefs” column Saturday.…

I confess that I’m always a little bit embarrassed by the propensity of the American leadership of my people (the Jews) to try to get Christians to grant us admission in the, ah, club. The president of the Southern Baptist Convention opines that God doesn’t hear our prayers…well, why should we give a shit? Sorry.…

The folks at Gallup headlined yesterday’s survey on political preference by race/ethnicity and religion, “Republicans Remain Disproportionately White and Religious.” They might have headlined it, “Democrats Remain Disproportionately Non-white and Not So Religious”–but that would have been wrong. Sixty-two percent of Democrats are non-Hispanic whites, which is very close to the 2009 Census Department estimate…

According to the latest Newsweek poll, 24 percent of Americans think Obama is either Muslim or a follower of Islam. And 31 percent think it’s definitely or probably true that he “sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.” I’m guessing that the Obamas will be joining…

What’s up with Glenn Beck? The Washington media were shocked by the religiosity of his “Restoring Honor” rally last Saturday–but what do you expect from a press gang that only knows how to fight the last war. It overlooked last year’s Beck rally–and so hyped this one as Beck’s Second Coming. (See Douthat, Ross). But…

Since it covered itself with obloquy by taking a stand against the proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, the ADL has been eager to put some distance between itself and its co-opponents. Franklin Graham, for example, who seized the occasion to issue his latest denunciation of Islam in general: President Bush and President Obama…

I know you’ve been waiting for this. My position is that, having received the appropriate local sign-offs, the Muslim folks who purchased the old Burlington Coat Factory store on Park Place in Lower Manhattan have every right to build their community center. Given all the fuss, which may or may not have been predictable, I’m…

I get a lot of spam over on Spiritual Politics (still waiting for that captcha program), and mostly it has to do with product promotions–replica rolodexes, male sex products–and fulsome but sadly unspecific tributes to the blog’s high quality. Over the past couple of days, however, there has been a slew of messages relating to…
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