ReligionDispatches.org

Yesterday RD associate editor Sarah Posner appeared on GRITtv with Laura Flanders, assessing the role of anti-abortion activists at CPAC. She found that while the tea party activists who dominated the conference were claiming to be "saving freedom" from the "tyranny" of liberalism and progressivism, some anti-abortion activists were invoking the civil rights movement as a model for "saving freedom, one life at a time."

Watch it:

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Hussein Rashid's Nov. 11th article Spinning Ft. Hood generated some very strong feelings and a number of comments that violated our commenting policy. As a result we closed comments and invited readers to send a letter to the editor (a format we'll be moving to on all stories when we relaunch early next year. Blogs will continue to feature comments).

The following is one such letter:

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If you get the Women's Entertainment channel in your cable package, be sure to tune in tonight at ten to see RD's Kathryn Joyce discuss her book Quiverfull on a special program, "Born to Breed." For other broadcast times, check out the web site. 

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Ariel Glucklich sent the following letter in response to Bruce Lawrence’s review of his latest book. In it, Prof. Lawrence wrote that Dying for Heaven is a “bizarrely casual, yet deeply serious, treatise,” adding that, “the thesis of the book itself would be a laughing matter were the author not intent on altering the way that the defense establishment—and not just academics or scholars of religion—think about ‘holy pleasure.’”

Prof. Glucklich writes:

Dying for Heaven is a tightly argued deductive theory of religion that must be read from beginning to end, without skipping around, in order to be understood and appreciated. Its basic premise is that behavioral adaptation and hedonic psychology can help us understand religious motivation. Hedonic psychology, needless to say, has nothing to do with Timothy Leary or Harvard University. It has a great deal to do with Michel Cabanac, Kent Berridge, Daniel Kahnemann and many others.

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 Stephen Colbert barely clings to his persona in criticizing Supreme Court Justice Scalia's arguments in favor of the cross in the Buono v. Salazar case.

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To accompany RD's roundtable on rethinking the progressive position on church-state separation (watch for it on Tuesday) we present the video of the last month's Netroots Nation panel. Below is the NN description. Watch the video after the jump.

The old liberal vision of a total separation of religion from politics has been discredited. Despite growing secularization, a secular progressive majority is still impossible, and a new two-part approach is needed—one that first admits that there is no political wall of separation. Voters must be allowed, without criticism, to propose policies based on religious belief. But, when government speaks and acts, messages must be universal. The burden is on religious believers, therefore, to explain public references like “under God” in universal terms. For example, the word “God” can refer to the ceaseless creativity of the universe and the objective validity of human rights. Promoting and accepting religious images as universal will help heal culture-war divisions and promote the formation of a broad-based progressive coalition.

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"You don't have to make abortion illegal if you make it impossible"

"There is no debate. this is a civil war. the anti-abortion people are using bombs and bullets..."

Watch the story, reported by Maria Hinojosa, here:

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Civil Rights veteran and Chairman of the Civil Rights Activist Committee, Tommy Wren, and Pastor Gwen C. Webb, Vice Chairman of the CRAC, frame the Obama candidacy in terms of a "movement" and a Godsend—literally. Webb notes that Obama, like Jesus and MLK, is an activist.

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