The latest issue of Cultural Anthropology features an article by Revealer writer Yasmin Moll (read the entire issue here) titled, “Building the New Egypt: Islamic Televangelists, Revolutionary Ethics, and ‘Productive’ Citizenship.”  (You can read Yasmin’s article and the entire issue here.  You can read Yasmin’s articles for The Revealer here.)

From James Fenton’s review of the Broadway musical by the creators of “South Park,” “The Book of Mormon,” at The New York Review of Books:

From the point of view of the Mormon missionaries, the attitude of the natives toward Almighty God is crudely dismissive, and expressed in language that causes gasps of tickled outrage from the audience.  But it is impossible to reconcile this happy-go-lucky indifference to the Supreme Being with what we have encountered in recent history when the African churches have had their say on the future of, for instance, the Anglican Church.  What often comes back at us out of Africa, by way of Christian culture, is a sharp Victorian rebuke for our backsliding.  It has nothing happy-go-lucky about it.

A giant congratulations to The Revealer‘s founding editor, Jeff Sharlet, recipient of the Molly National Journalism Prize, named for Molly Ivins and sponsored by The Texas Observer.  The award is for Jeff’s Harper’s article on how US evangelicals contributed to the “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda.

He beat out Maureen Dowd of The New York Times and Joshua Kors of The Nation.

Stephen Prothero measures the distance Franklin has fallen from the Graham tree.  It’s old news by now that Sojourners and other progressive Christian organizations have a gay problem.  Hussein Rashid asks Muslims how they will treat LGBT people.  What do some Russian women see in Vladimir Putin?  Paul the Apostle, reports the Telegraph (via disinfo.com).  With a cue from Rob Bell, Chris Armstrong constructs a Handbook to Hell.  The When I Return Project: What will you do when you return to a liberated Palestine?  Anthea Butler on Glenn Beck’s plans to host a Restoring Courage rally in Jerusalem on August 20 this year.  An excerpt from Frank Schaeffer’s new book, about how “The Right” is waging a war on “all things public.” David Bahati, the author of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays Bill” may soon be that country’s Minister of Ethics.  Terry Mattingly begs for a definition of fundamentalist.

A week after David Kato, a rights activist, was killed in Uganda, President Obama attends the National Prayer Breakfast.  More on Kato at the New Yorker.

At the last minute Friday night, Brenda Namigadde, an activist from Uganda, was granted a reprieve by the UK from deportation.  She had already boarded a plane bound for Uganda.

Targeted by the Ugandan paper Rolling Stone as a lesbian, along with one hundred other gay and lesbian activists — one of which, David Kato, was brutally killed last week — Namigadde is in danger should she return to her home country.

For more on Namigadde and the Rolling Stone (not affiliated with the U.S. magazine) article and on Uganda’s “kill the gays” bill and the influence American religious organizations have had on anti-homosexual violence there read here, here, here and here.

Truth Wins Out takes the time to note contact information for senators and representatives as well as Ugandan officials affiliated with The Family and the “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda.  A vote, according to TWO’s Wayne Bresen is slated for some time after January 18th.

For more, read Warren Throckmorton here.

The Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, also known as the “kill the gays” bill, never went away.  We were just supposed to think it did.  A debate of the bill is set to begin before Uganda’s parliament in the next few months, writes Warren Throckmorton, who last week interviewed the author of the bill, David Bahati.

Today Bloggingheads.tv has posted a conversation on religion and the media between Jeff Sharlet, founder and contributing editor to The Revealer and author of the forthcoming C Street and Amy Sullivan, contributing writer with Time magazine.  The topics that they cover are:  the killing of 10 health workers/missionaries in Afghanistan; gay marriage; the “Ground Zero Mosque”; the rise of anti-Islam; the Uganda “kill the gays” bill; Anne Rice’s falling away.  The video is 56 minutes long but if you want to pop in on a subject, a key below the frame will tell you when.

By Jeff Sharlet

The reverence with which so many upper-middle class Americans read The Economist has always puzzled me. There’s much to admire about the magazine, but it generally performs the same function as Newsweek, boiling down events into centrist conventional wisdom, facts be damned. A report in the July 3, 2010 issue, “The religious right in east Africa: Slain by the spirit,” is a case in point. I’ve been reporting on the religious right anti-gay movement in Uganda from here in the U.S. and from Kampala for nine months now, so I’m in a good position to see The Economist’s strange moves; I wonder what I’d make of the article that follows it, on Somaliland’s elections, if I were as informed on that story. But one needn’t have expertise to debunk The Economist’s report; a Google search would do it, especially if you landed, as you likely would, on the well-documented blogs of gay activist Jim Burroway or evangelical scholar Warren Throckmorton.

The biggest error is The Economist’s declaration that the bill no longer calls for the death penalty. That’s propaganda put out by the bill’s defenders. In fact, as I learned by asking the bill’s author, Ugandan Member of Parliament David Bahati, it does. (I’ll be publishing those interviews in my forthcoming book, C Street.) Bahati acknowledges that the death penalty may drop out of the final version; but it hasn’t yet, and it’s dangerous for The Economist to say as much.