Inspiration Faith & Prayer Health & Wellness Entertainment Love & Family
Newsletters Special Offers

Steven Waldman

Check out this video of Obama shooting hoops. If he’d hit the rim, it would have had no effect on the election. If he’d missed entirely, he would have lost the election (since he’d be an elitist girly-man). But since he hit it, I think he just won Michigan. Maybe Ohio, too.I jest but this…

The political prognostication website 538.com explains that Obama’s supporters are more enthusiastic than McCains and suggests that the solution for McCain might be to put Mike Huckabee on the ticket to rev up evangelicals. “It’s certainly the simplest and most direct way for McCain to lock down the support and enthusiasm of that desperately-needed evangelical…

Via Andrew Sullivan, Jane Mayer elaborates on her criticisms of Marty Seligman, the psychologist who she believes helped the U.S. Government develop torture techniques. Many of her questions are good and we’d like to see him answer them, too. However, her claim that his denial [full text here] made no effort to explain what he…

Long-time Beliefnet contributor Lama Surya Das represented Buddhism spectacularly well in this most challenging venue:

David Brody of Christian Broadcasting Network has a good run-down of McCain’s flip-flop (clarification? refinement?) about gay adoption. Basically, at first he said gays shouldn’t be allowed to adopt even if the alternative was an orphange or foster care. Then he said that states could allow that if they want. Brody says McCain had been…

I completely missed the story about Obama kicking the boy in the head:

Shabos goy is the term used by orthodox Jews for gentiles who help them with certain tasks they’re forbidden from doing during the Sabbath, such as operating electrical devices. According to Newsweek’s excellent cover story on Obama’s faith, when he was a state senator in Illinois his roommate was Ira Silverstein, an Orthodox Jew. He…

An important split is emerging within the Democratic Party over abortion. Barack Obama’s reaction to it will tell us a great deal about how he intends to unify people of different views and manage key voting blocs. A group of progressive evangelicals, including Rev. Jim Wallis, has urged Sen. Obama to embrace an “abortion reduction…

A man who created a beefcake calendar of (male) Mormon missionaries has been excommunicated. (Hattip: Andrew Sullivan) Those of you who follow this genre may be interested in the Nuns Having Fun calendar or the Roman Priests beefcake calendar. I’m guessing neither of those had official church approval either.

I was rather stunned to see that Jane Mayer’s new book is reporting that Prof. Martin Seligman helped the U.S. government design its torture regimen. The administration’s torture architects used Seligman’s research on “learned helplessness” to craft their approaches, according to some accounts of Mayer’s book. This struck us as odd. Beliefnet readers are more…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners