St. Louis may be best known for its Gateway Arch, but for GetReligion regulars, perhaps it’s best known for Tim Townsend . We’re regularly reading reports from Townsend, who has been the religion reporter at the St
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5Q+1: Meet Tim Townsend in St. Louis
When I think about great magazine features about religion news in the age of GetReligion, some of the first stories that leap into my mind are headlines like “ The Jesus War ,” which probed the roots of Mel Gibson’s “Passion” play on film, and “ Jesus in the Classroom ,” which offers an unusually balanced and nuanced account of the battles over religion and American history in the elite public-school classrooms of Cupertino, Calif. Alas, the highly skilled Peter J.
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Let’s play, ‘Edit The New Yorker’!
The New York Times ran a huge page one feature on Anwar al-Awlaki. He’s the American-born Muslim cleric now active with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He had ties to several of the 9/11 terrorists but his work with Fort Hood shooter and the Northwest Flight 253 underwear bomber have gotten renewed attention from the American government
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Trusting in al-Awlaki
He is one of the few priests in the Catholic church who call themselves faith healers . McAlear’s blessing is a very real attempt to cure the patient with prayer, and with the laying on of hands. Because it is not a sacrament, anyone can receive the blessing, even non-Catholics.
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Thousands Believe Catholic Priest Richard McAlear Heals The Sick
So, if you were a college senior and you went to Woodstock, how old would you be today? It’s hard not to think about questions like that one while reading the Washington Post report about a new AARP sex survey , yet another story that demonstrates that there is nothing about Baby Boomer life that will escape newspaper headlines. Guess what?
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AARP Woodstock: Sex & spirituality
Bernard Cohen will be awarded an honorary doctorate from St. Mary-of-the-Woods, where he taught in a time of new outreach. Even now, 41 years later, the photograph of Seth Cohen’s bar mitzvah carries an element of surprise, even shock
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Indiana Catholic college recalls era of change as it honors rabbi
MIAMI — When Jeff Masters had $30,000 in medical bills after getting bladder cancer, he didn't pay through conventional insurance. Instead, he had thousands of fellow Christians foot the bill. Masters, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is part of a growing number of Americans who are m…
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'Health-sharing' ministries growing
Anyone who knows anything about Islam knows that devout Muslim believers who practice their faith do not drink alcohol. It is not very hard to find this out, as this Google search shows ( Muslim beliefs on drinking alcohol ). That’s why I was rather surprised to read an interesting, but rather strange, detail in one of the many New York Times updates on the life of Faisal Shahzad and the various influences in his life that may, or may not, have led him to attempt an act of terrorism in Times Square
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Why? ‘Zeal’ for living as a Muslim?
What happened to Mary Stauffer 30 years ago could have been a scene in a horror film. One of her former Algebra students abducted her for two months, repeatedly raping her while her 8-year-old daughter was kept in the closet. Her captor also killed a 6-year-old boy who was playing in the park when he saw the abduction
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Recovering from the horror
Paul Harvey As promised a few posts ago, I’m posting here an interview with Jon Pahl, one of our occasional contributors here at the blog, and most recently author of Empires of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence , just out with NYU Press. It’s not every book that juxtaposes theories of religion drawn from the likes of Bruce Lincoln and Thomas Tweed, reflections on violence (defined very broadly as “any harm to or destruction of life, whether intended by individuals or enacted by systems of language, policy, and practice”) inspired by Rene Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, youth culture in post-World War II America and films from Reefer Madness to Halloween to Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, slaveholding religion and the resistance to it from Frederick Douglass and Jarena Lee, the culture of public executions from Quakers in 17th-century New England to Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking , and finally the rhetoric of “sacrifice” surrounding American wars and how that rhetoric has shaped recent involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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The Paradox of Religion and Violence, and Why Religions Are Not Shit: An Interview with Jon Pahl