News clips on Youtube show us the real McCain  Most of it is devastating and ought to be played and replayed throughout the coming campaign.

On your mark. Get set. Grind your teeth!  McCain Campaign Agrees With CNBC Pundit: Americans Making $200,000 Are ‘Not Rich’

Look out below....

More movement in a progressive direction is being detected in some evangelical circles. This time in the area of sexual matters.

Traditionally, it's been thought (and taught) by many, that Christians should believe sex is only for procreation. No fun allowed. However, there's a growing number of Christians that feel God created sex for a number of reasons. Yes, procreation is one, very important part, but the profound spiritual/physical power of sex is so much more complex and far reaching than simply that. Much less appreciated. Citing scripture, they say the Bible also encourages sex as a way to strengthen marital bonds, as a defense against indiscriminate lust, and as a means for dispensing pleasure and comfort. Far from being against adult sex education, a growing number of Christians now are actively seeking ways to improve their sex lives within the context of their faith.

All I can say is... Hallelujah!!!

Allow me be one of the first to offer my evangelical brothers and sisters good luck and Godspeed in this worthy endeavor of their's.

Christians Promote Holy, Hot Sex in Marriage
By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES

Picking through the garden for the irrepressible and ever present fern sprouts that routinely shot up through the hand tilled soil, Paul beamed paternally as his children defied the rigors of the wild, entering boldly into the world. Noting how well the basil was budding from all the tender trimmings they'd been given over the passed few weeks, he snipped another broad leaf from one of the Italian Reds, folding it into his cheek to chew while he worked. The dragonflies, swarming overhead, darted in the air from mosquito to mosquito as they fed, humming as a flock of tibetan monks might while chanting their prayers in the early evening twilight. The mountainside meadow, filled with low lying blueberry bushes no longer able to hide their bounty from beneath their dwarfish canopies, gave up the suns warmth it had been gathering through-out the day on a subtle summer evenings breeze. Selecting two round, red and ripe tomatoes, Paul headed off to the kitchen to prepare his supper.

When the book unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons came out in October, I decided to read it yet was not going to buy it, so went through the proper channels to get the County Library to purchase a copy. Since I hadn't heard from them, I assumed they decided against it, but when I got some other books on Tuesday, the librarian noted that it had come in and was on hold for me, so took it home.

I come from a family deeply rooted in the conservative fundamentalist arm of Christianity and, although my progressivism marks me as the black sheep of the family, I still get a lot of messages from relatives that support the war, demean we who are against the war, or both.  My family isn't alone, of course:  There's an awful lot of Americans who assert their Christianity and their support for the war with equal fervor.  And I confess that I just don't get it.

What follows are thoughts, to which I will subject my family, explaining how my stand against the war (like my progressivism itself) is a product of my Christian heritage and teaching, as well as my relationship with God.  

In short:  Jesus made me do it.

Apparently, even the Episcopalians discriminate sometimes, and we're not talking about the shades of flavor in gruyere and port.

I've heard of such things - yes, even in the Very Liberal UCC. I myself have been asked if I were married, gay, and/or a Packers fan. More times than I can count, a search committee has asked me my stance on homosexuality, with the implication being that if I couldn't find it in me to ban teh gay from the church, it wasn't worth continuing the interview.

The greatest weird search committee questionnaire, though, was the group who ran through a few principles of biblical inerrancy with me. For the record, I got the questions about half-right.

It was funny to laugh at how spectacularly off the mark those folks were. About the last thing anyone who knew me would take me for would be an inerrantist. But as least you knew where you stood with those folks. And they weren't mean about it, just thought I wasn't going to be the pastor for them. And you know, they were probably right.

Anyway, you wonder sometimes what goes through people's heads. I got a call from a church once wanting to set up a phone interview on a certain night. The only trouble was that it was the same night I was supposed to take out my girlfriend for her birthday (unconscionably, I dated before Mrs Pastor). So I said no, I was not available that night, and promptly never heard from them again.

The girlfriend said I could have talked to them. But if they weren't willing to bend for my (almost) family then, what would they be like when I worked for them? I was better off knowing what they were like ahead of time.

Sad but true, and it applies to all those churches, Episcopalian or otherwise.

(Via some devil-worshiping blog.)

"Nashua belongs to Jesus Christ."

That's the slogan on the bumper sticker of a car in the parking lot of my apartment complex in Nashua, New Hampshire. I've seen it several times over the last few weeks. It's either a campaign of some sort, or else I keep noticing the same two or three cars. I'd ask somebody, but the cars are always either empty or moving.

To me it sounds like a threat, like non-Christians should get out of town or something. Is that paranoid? Maybe the people who drive these cars are just clueless and don't realize that it sounds that way.

What do the rest of you think? Have you run into this in your town? What's it supposed to mean?

I came across this article by Shmuley Boteach while researching something about religion and the presidential campaign (cookies to Aaron Krager, IIRC).

Boteach isn't exactly who I'd look to for authoritative political commentary, and this column shows why. Yes, Christians and Jews have different views on how people are redeemed. Yes, Christians might demand a bit too much perfection. But come on: anybody who doesn't recognize that Rudy Giuliani is  a fundamentally broken person who needs to be kept far, far away from the levers of American power - well, they need to read Vanity Fair.

But Shmuley does find a nut worth discussing:

A close friend recently lamented in conversation that the Republicans have "stolen God". Maybe, I thought, but at least they haven't yet stolen Jesus.

While many on the righteously rigid religious right say they’ve "found" him, the story of Jesus too many have found is the one they’ve written themselves – the one in which a vengeful Jesus wields his cross as a sword and a shield. That’s not the Jesus I know, nor the one known by many Americans, irrespective of their political affiliations.

I personally know a dozen or more Republicans who voted against their party in the past several national elections in part because they recognize this. They recognize that their party has been hijacked by those who’ve taken scissors to their Bibles, and cut them so severely, that their version now begins with the Old Testament and ends with Revelations, with little resembling Jesus’ teachings left in between.

From the diaries by MK

This story has become fairly popular on my blog. Its of a very personal matter so I was not sure if it was something that I would like to expose to unbridled criticisms by posting on a public forum such as Street Prophets. However, I have realized that this story may prove valuable not only to Muslims but others of faith as well. I sincerely pray that it is at least an inspiring story that encourages sincerity in worship, wa Allahu a'alam (and God knows best).

For all the crap I give to the bloggers at the conservative site GetReligion, we agree on one fundamental proposition: that the media coverage of religion in America isn't very good.

Coverage of religion & politics is even worse, as Mollie notes:

Last week Michael Luo of The New York Times had a fascinating piece about the public piety of Sen. Hillary Clinton. After decades of losing socially conservative religious voters, Democrats are noticeably reaching out to religious folks. It’s wise for media outlets to track and analyze the move.

Of course, journalists are at a bit of a disadvantage that may affect the quality of the pieces about the trend. For one, they seem to have totally bought into a simplistic two-party story of religion and politics in America. They say, well on the left you have mainstream religious folks who think Jesus wanted big government social welfare programs and on the right you have those evangelicals and fundies who say Jesus only cared about protecting unborn children and keeping marriage sacred.

This trend both shortchanges the larger story and serves the narrow interests of the two groups that get all the coverage. It serves the two groups because it helps push their very real special interests to the forefront of media coverage. But it shortchanges the larger stories because it completely misses those who don’t fit in either camp — the churches that are focused less on American politics and more on, say, the Sacraments, worship, eternal life, etc. It also neglects the very real similarities of the groups on left and right: they highlight moralism, relevance, and personal feeling and politicize the moral meaning of Christianity; they tend not to embrace ritual, churchliness, and tradition....

I disagree with large portions of this, particularly the first paragraph, which repeats what we might call the "Amy Sullivan hypothesis". We'll get into what's wrong with that in another post.

I'm also not convinced that Mollie's idea of structural similarities between conservative and liberal Christians holds up. I'm sure the Episcopalians would love nothing better than to retreat into "ritual, churchliness, and tradition," for example, except that they're under constant siege by the IRD and other conservative ideologues.

In any case, the core of the analysis is dead-on: coverage of these subjects gravitates to the extremes, which leaves the vast majority of people out.

MANY folks, including some who should know better, have expressed surprise that the 2008 presidential campaign is so thoroughly mired in questions of faith (and by "faith," I really mean "Christianity").

This really shouldn't be such a shock. The country has spent the better part of 30 years being told that all Real Christians cared about was abortion and teh gayz. Lately, that's morphed into making war on brown people and keeping them out of our nation, but the principle is the same. Christians, we have been told over and over and over again, are defined by who they are against. And finally, after decades of this, rank-and-file believers are starting to get sick of it. They're sick of the conservative project as a whole, actually: sick of war and trickle-down economics and bashing people who are different from us.

But the way this plays out for Christians is that they've gotten sick of being told that if they really had faith, they'd have banned abortion and outlawed the queers years ago. What about, you know, feeding the hungry? Making peace? Caring for one another? I hear these questions all the time in my mostly apolitical, very-not-liberal congregation.

People are just tired of all the b.s. that has been going on about supposed American values, and they want the old ones back. The presidential campaign is just a proxy battle for that larger fight. That, more than anything, is what drives Americans' desire for their president to be a religious person, I think. But to Mollie's point, it's also indicative that sacramental types aren't the only ones who get left out when the story of American Christianity is told.

Street Prophets: now proudly a member of the objectively pro-Ganesha caucus.

Election Central asked Benham what he thought of Tim Wildmon, president of the far-right American Family Association, who was quoted by CNN condemning the Pavkovic family's behavior. Wildmon told CNN: "We would not ever encourage shouting in the gallery like that, we asked people to contact their Senators to show their disapproval."

Benham said he respects Wildmon as a friend and ally, but he thinks his friend is simply wrong on this matter. "Our answer is," Benham said, "When one stands up in the face of gross idolatry being allowed in the Senate, in the chamber of the United States Senate, it is incumbent on a Christian to stand up and speak the truth. No matter what, we must obey God rather than men."

"When you stand up and are arrested, and the Hindu is allowed to go free, this country has gone upside-down," Benham added — though when asked, he later clarified that he does not believe people of other religions should be arrested for their beliefs. "Now, why are Hindus allowed here? Why are Muslims allowed here? Because we are a nation that's free, built upon the principles of almighty God."