Mormonism and Mammonism are contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. They offer another Lord Jesus than the One offered in the Scriptures and Christian tradition, and another way to approach him. An embrace of these tragic new vehicles for the old Gnostic heresy is unloving to our Mormon friends and secularist neighbors, and to the rest of the watching world.

...this debate isn't abut correctness.  Or freedom of religion.  Or even the idea that if this mosque doesn't get built, it will mean we are now deciding about religious freedom in this country one neighborhood at a time.  It is about common sense. More than that, it is about the constitutents of Sept. 11.

That Miller, who supports abortion and gay rights, found common ground with Robertson on Bush’s war on terror illustrates the political power of Islamophobia for the GOP. In many ways, it has become the glue that anti-Communism used to be: a demon that fundamentalist Christians and white ethnic voters from outside the Bible Belt (Reagan Democrats used to be the term for them) can both agree to curse.

Do you think Muslims will turn to Christ as a result of this? This is our prayer and desire that they would seriously reexamine their religion. They will then come to the conclusion that Islam is of the devil and Christianity is the only true religion. … Have any of the media reports of this event portrayed you unfairly or inaccurately? Would you like to set the record straight on any particular issue? We have been accused of being racist. We are not attacking a race. In other words, we are not attacking the Moslem. We love the Moslems and hope that they would come to true salvation. What we are attacking is Islam, the religion, and Sharia law, the political system.

I do not understand you Americans," he said, sighing.  "Look at a woman like Hillary Clinton, supporting the killing of babies, and then you say no, you should not threaten to punish somebody with death."  He was coming to terms with the possibility that the threat of losing foreign aid -- Sweden said they'd cut theirs; Germany would offer Museveni $148 million to muzzle Bahati -- would force him to make a deal:  no death penalty.  He'd have to settle for prison and purges.  He'd have to settle for prison and purges.  "Leviticus is very clear.  If a man sleeps with a man -- punishable by death.  If a woman sleeps with a man -- punishable.

I’m all for social justice. I’m passionate about it. Christians have to be serving people and loving them not just in word but in deed. But man, if I hear another well-fed, Toms-wearing evangelical kid quote St. Francis (“preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words”) one more time as a justification for their unwillingness to utter a word to anyone about Christ as the one true hope, I don’t know what I’ll do. It’s an ongoing debate in missiology: Should missionaries in foreign countries prioritize meeting physical needs (food, water, social justice, development) before they preach the gospel, or should evangelism always be given primacy? To me, the debate is silly. Can’t we do both simultaneously? Can’t we serve others and meet their circumstantial needs while at the same time telling them about Jesus? Yes, we should be in Africa building water wells, or in Haiti building schools, but what’s the harm in mentioning along the way that we are Christians acting as the church, loving the world because God loved it?

The basic argument of what follows is this: Fundamentalism in America changed after the 1970s–perhaps so much that the word “fundamentalism” is no longer appropriate for what it became. In that decade, the movement began a tectonic shift from protecting theological truths in infra-denominational fights to guarding “Christian morality” in a nation specially chosen by God. To be sure, “correct” views of the person of Christ and his atoning work, along with vividly detailed end-time scenarios, have continued to occupy an important place in the movement, but these things are not what the “new fundamentalists” are most centrally about. No, they have seen America locked in a battle with a secularizing juggernaut, and they have rushed to take up the “arms” of pragmatic political measures and boundary-breaking religious alliances in order to gain the upper hand.

Let’s be honest. It’s easy to take shots at an institution — especially Christianity and the church. For Christians, it’s our family and that gives us license and permission to speak constructively or critically about our own family. We all do it. Men, women, children. Poets, singers, skeptics, believers, cynics, liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Presbyterians, Baptists, Calvinists, Arminians, and even you and me. In fact, it’s become the somewhat cool, hip, and edgy thing to do … because you are more [wait for it ... wait for it] — authentic.

Ahhh. Authentic Christianity. And while I can’t argue that Anne’s descriptions are entirely inaccurate, I really do wonder if we’ve allowed these assumptions, judgments, and descriptives to become the totality of Christianity. Is it possible that we’ve given these descriptives so much press that it has grown bigger than reality? They have grown to be such that many — perhaps including ourselves — have come to believe that Christianity is all about being anti-gay, anti-feminist, and anti-artificial birth control (anti-science)?

• Are those descriptives realities for some and in some communities? Yes.
• Are they the totality of the movement of Christianity? No.

Christ died for an imperfect church.

So here is my question for religious liberals and moderates [who] really do know what the Bible says: Do you care enough about the poor and vulnerable to declare yourself an unabashed Big Government supporter? Because equivocation on this one equals suffering and death.

When my daughter first explained to me why she wanted to be a rabbi, she said that she had watched my wife and I spend a lifetime seeking to use law and reason to bring moral order to a chaotic universe. “Your norms are too thin,” she told me. “I’m going to try to achieve the same goals — but I’m going to use thicker norms.” Sally Gordon’s excellent book explains why she was right. In the long run, the norms of faith are thicker than the norms of law and reason. That’s often grounds for celebration. But it’s also a reason to be very frightened.

Now, the religious message is that it is God who provides the newness to move things along. Specifically, according to Brueggemann, God provides a risky and "just enough" economic alternative to the madness of the market idolatry. But take out the God piece, and you still have a useful insight: our current stuckness isn't a matter of political malpractice or corruption. It's a failure of the imagination on a grand scale, an inability to conceive that newness is needed, much less that it must be embraced. Some days, I think we'd all be better off if we called it what it is, a "failure of the moral imagination," as Hannah Arendt once said, real and meaningful evil. You don't have to believe in God to get that.

Baltasar recoiled in alarm, he made a rapid sign of the cross, in order not to give the devil time to commit any mischief, What are you saying, Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco, where is it written that God is one-handed, No one ever said so, nor has it ever been written, only I say that God's left hand is missing, because it is on His right, at His right hand, that the chosen sit, nor do you find any reference to God's left hand either in the Holy Scriptures or in the writings of the holy doctors of the Church, no one sits at God's left hand, for it is a void, a nothingness, an absence, therefore God is one-handed.  The priest gave a deep sigh and concluded, He has no left hand.

Nothing as handsome as these churches will ever again be built in these villages; their presence there seems almost miraculous, like finding an original Leonardo in a Skegness postcard rack. But how empty they are! Christian worship seems to have melted away almost as completely as the wool trade, and long before Richard Dawkins and the atheist revival came hunting for an argument. We should at least take care to preserve its inspiring remains.