Family news:  “It might be tempting to dismiss the Family as just another product of the home of conspiracy theories. But its leader, Doug Coe, has been attested to by presidents such as the Bushes, senior and junior, and Bill Clinton. Ronald Reagan said of the Family: “It is working precisely because it is private.” — Ian Munro takes the measure of American fundamentalism from the down under in the Sydney Morning Herald.

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A dream realized: The Family featured on Christian Right radio. Host Paul Edwards invited me onto his June 12 show (along with Ralph Reed!) as a follow-up to our on-air conversation the previous week. Most radio hosts don’t actually read their guests’ books; instead they rely on questions supplied by their producers. But Edwards was disturbed enough by our first conversation to actually read the book. Now he’s asking his Christian conservative listeners to look past HarperCollins’ scare packaging. “Don’t let your first impressions, and how it’s being parsed in the media, particularly the evangelical media, dissuade you from reading it.” You can download the show for a few more days here.

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Christopher Martin, PopMatters: “What if there also have been fundamentalists that not only remained “in the world” (so to speak), but also established themselves within the upper echelons of governmental power? And what if their power and influence became such that they helped destabilize the New Deal, played key roles in anti-Communist foreign policy during the Cold War, and supported numerous bloodthirsty dictators? This is Jeff Sharlet’s stunning claim in The Family, one of the most important books on American religion and politics to appear this year…” Martin’s full review.