May 15, 2008 | 11:46 pm

Palestinian awareness week at UC Irvine

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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I returned to UC Irvine today for the final day of Palestinian awareness week. Amir Abdel Malik Ali, who, days after the terror attack on a Jerusalem yeshiva, stood in front of the Israeli consulate in L.A. and called Zionists the new Nazis, delivered a lunchtime tirade about America the imperialist, in bed with the Zionists, and the quick death that would soon befall one and then the other. I agree Rome is burning and worry about what that would mean for Israel, but I try not to undercut my argument by praising Hamas and Hezbollah as freedom fighters.

The scene at UC Irvine, however, was a lot tamer than in years past, and I’ll be writing more about that later. For now, I just wanted to share one of the photos I snapped, this of a torn and bloodied Israeli flag.

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May 15, 2008 | 2:28 pm

The dangerous world of religion reporting

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’ve been there, attacked by fellow Christians for critical articles I’ve written about them.

Religion reporting has proven not only challenging but humorous for a Christian named Greenberg. Christians blame negative stories on my Jewish byline; Jews offer guilt-laden responses to articles that buck the corporate line (or what they wish were); and Muslims, I think, don’t know what to expect.

Once considered a backwater of journalism, the God beat feels to me quite chosen, home to immensely important and interesting news. Religion, after all, is the rubric through which each person uniquely sees the world. Science, education, politics, entertainment—it regularly serves as an undercurrent in these fields. (That was, in fact, part of my pitch at The Sun three years ago when they were looking for a reporter for the newly created position and I was eager to get out of Rialto.) The religion angle also is occasionally relevant when trying to understand peoples’ beliefs in God, their perspectives on the life hereafter and that which gives every day meaning.

Think of the God beat as the Jerusalem of journalism. Seriously.

On this topic, Tim Townsend, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s excellent religion reporter, has an amazing piece in the current Columbia Journalism Review. He discusses the religious origins of the United States, the Dover monkey trial in 2005 and the challenges of sensitively reporting on other peoples’ religious beliefs.

The portion I found most fascinating, however, was the ugly description of what happened when Townsend wrote an article that was considered too favorable to CAIR and got on the bad side of the Little Green Footballs blog community. Here it is (and was):

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May 15, 2008 | 10:12 am

Bush to Israel: ‘Masada will not fall again’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Speaking today to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, President Bush said the bond between the United States and Israel was unbreakable and promised that “Masada will not fall again.”

“Some people suggest that if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away,” Bush said in his prepared address.

“This is a tired argument that buys into the propaganda of our enemies, and America rejects it utterly. Israel’s population may be just over 7 million. But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because America stands with you.”

Masada is the desert fortress near the Dead Sea where, after the destruction of the Second Temple, 960 Jewish zealots committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans.

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May 14, 2008 | 4:54 pm

GodTube likes big bucks

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’ve never used GodTube, the evangelical equivalent of YouTube, but apparently enough people have that a London hedge fund thought the company deserved a $30 million investment. The NY Times explains:

When it was formally introduced last August, GodTube was the fastest-growing Web site, as rated by comScore, attracting 1.7 million unique visitors for the month. The traffic remains about the same today. “People thirst for more than just a once-a-week relationship with the Lord and Savior,” said Jason Illian, Big Jump Media’s chief strategy officer. “They desire something that they can live out 24/7.”

Unlike its secular cousin, YouTube, GodTube is proudly filtered: all content must gain approval from the site’s headquarters in Plano, Tex. Vulgar and overtly sexual material isn’t allowed. Neither are videos promoting other religions — for that, there are JewTube.com and IslamicTube.net. (Appropriately enough, the domain name SatanTube.com is for sale.)

Mocking Christianity is definitely not allowed. James O’Malley, a 20-year-old from Leicestershire, in Britain, posted a series of videos last year that jeered at evangelical theology. During a videotaped walking tour of the Natural History Museum in London, he referred to a plesiosaur fossil as a “liar-saur” and noted that volcanoes tended to erupt in non-Christian countries.

“The first couple of videos, where I spoke about Biblical infallibility and homosexuality, remained on GodTube and were treated like any other video,” Mr. O’Malley said. “It was only when I posted a third video suggesting that the earth was flat and that astronauts were part of the ‘round earth’ conspiracy that they finally cottoned on to the fact it was a hoax, and I was banned.”

More in line with GodTube’s spirit is “Baby Got Book,” a satire of the rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot’s ode to the full-size derrière, “Baby Got Back.” In it, Dan Smith, a 34-year-old minister at a church near Cleveland, simultaneously praises godly women and pokes fun at aspects of Christian culture. He dances around with a gold neck medallion reading KJV (for King James Version) and tweaks Sir Mix-A-Lot’s lyrics so that “butt” becomes “Bible” and “she looks like a total prostitute” turns into “looks like Mother Teresa.”

The video has logged more views on GodTube than it has on YouTube. Mr. Smith says he appreciates the exposure, though he prefers promoting his music in places where he can reach nonbelievers, like call-in radio shows. “I just know there aren’t a lot of unchurched or de-churched people going to GodTube,” he said.

I just watched “Baby Got Book” while typing this, and it was worth a few good laughs. Not $30 million, but at least $5. I’m interested to see how GodTube makes money off its popularity.

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May 14, 2008 | 3:39 pm

More Ruth Wisse, Jews and Power

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Nextbook’s second annual “festival of ideas” will be held Sunday in New York. This year’s theme is “Jews and Power” and it will feature thinkers like J.J. Goldberg and Ruth Wisse. In preparation, Wisse, who recently wrote a book bearing the same name as the conference, penned a piece for The Forward that argues how the world would have changed if the Jews had remained the masters of their own universe.

Had Jews always remained a self-governing people in their land, there would have been no Crusader wars over Jerusalem, no Spanish Inquisition and no Holocaust. Karl Marx would not have concluded that “the bill of exchange is the Jew’s actual god” and Stalin would not have mounted a lethal campaign against Jewish “rootless cosmopolitans.” Host nations would not have wreaked upon Jews some of the most terrible evils in the history of humankind. The Jewish contribution to the welfare of the world would have been all the greater had the Jews managed to secure for themselves their aboriginal land.

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May 14, 2008 | 11:57 am

College administrator fired over ‘anti-gay’ column

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

You can say a lot of things as a tenured faculty member that you could not say as a service worker or administrator—positions that are not tenured. Case in point: Crystal Dixon was fired as the associate vp of human resources at the University of Toledo after she wrote a column criticizing comparisons between the drive for legalizing same-sex unions and the civil rights movement.

I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a Black woman. I am genetically and biologically a Black woman and very pleased to be so as my Creator intended. Daily, thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle evidenced by the growing population of PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex Gays) and Exodus International just to name a few. Frequently, the individuals report that the impetus to their change of heart and lifestyle was a transformative experience with God; a realization that their choice of same-sex practices wreaked havoc in their psychological and physical lives.

Dixon has sought the help of the conservative ACLU, the Thomas More Law Center.

Creator’s note: I’ve been trying to publish this post and another on “Jews and Power” all day. However, I have been unable due to some irregular blogging issues that should be resolved soon.

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May 14, 2008 | 10:05 am

Inside the wacky world of Christian pop culture

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

At my high school graduation party, a friend who was not a Christian walked up and commented on the music playing over the outdoor speakers at my parents’ house.

“Why is it,” he asked, “that Christian bands always have the best musicians?”

I was a bit perplexed: The tunes he was hearing belonged to Midtown, a pop-punk quartet whose members, as far as I knew, were not Christian.

I also disagreed with my friend’s assessment. I mean, I was a big fan of MxPx and Slick Shoes ... but the best musicians? Hardly. (For evidence, listen to”Rappin for Jesus” by Stephen Wiley.)

Until a few years ago, Christian bands occasionally would have a radio hit or two—dc Talk and Jars of Clay had their moment, as did Sixpence None the Richer—and then disappear back into oblivion.

Switchfoot, whose CD a friend of mine picked up in a South Dakota pawn shop during our 2001 road trip around the country (that’s a different, longer story), seems to have bucked that trend. Being heard on TV promos and Star 98.7, or whatever the pop rock station is in your town, for years to follow, Switchfoot has been one of the lucky few who have broken through without significantly changing their message, though I would argue they too have watered it down and published one really bad album.

This music is part of the bigger, “parallel universe of Christian pop culture,” as Daniel Radosh dubs the industry in his new book “Rapture Ready!” (Radosh’s list of the top 10 Christian songs begins with Larry Norman‘s “Why Don’t You Look Into Jesus?”)

“Rapture Ready!” details the exploits of a secular New York Jew on a quest to the center of evangelical culture. Radosh visits the International Christian Retail Show, the Holy Land Experience and Stephen Baldwin World; serves as part of the mob calling for Christ’s crucifixion in Arkansas’ Great Passion Play; and goes backstage with Bibleman, AKA “Batman for Jesus.” I’ll forgive Radosh for avoiding VeggieTales night at a minor league baseball stadium and the giants who break burning stacks of bricks in Jesus’ name.

Radosh intersperses Christian camp with more sober accounts of economics and theology. Chapter 4 focuses on the Bible-publishing business and originally appeared in The New Yorker, and Chapter 5, which, believe it or not, appeared in Playboy, is about pre-millenialism and the “Left Behind” phenomenon.

“In the end,” Brian McLaren, author of “A New Kind of Christian,” proclaims on the book jacket, “he offers evaluations and insights that might be considered downright prophetic, and compassionate too. No evangelical insider could have done as good a job as Daniel Radosh.”

He’s definitely more sensitive to things he finds strange than Matt Taibbi. The book has been well-reviewed by Relevant magazine and The Forward, among others. I read through a chunk of it last night and, for some reason, found the style quite similar to A.J. Jacobs’ in “The Year of Living Biblically.” (Jacobs, possibly not by coincidence, also wrote a review for the book jacket.)

In the intro, Radosh explains that Christian culture is no laughing matter, at least not from a business perspective: It is a $7 billion a year industry.

“At some point,” Hanna Rosin wrote for Slate.com, “Radosh asks the obvious question”:

Didn’t Jesus chase the money changers out of the temple? In other words, isn’t there something wrong with so thoroughly commercializing all aspects of faith? For this, the Christian pop-culture industry has a ready answer. Evangelizing and commercializing have much in common. In the “spiritual marketplace” (as it’s called), Christianity is a brand that seeks to dominate. Like Coke, it wants to hold onto its followers and also win over new converts. As with advertisers, the most important audience is young people and teenagers, who are generally brand loyalists. Hence, Bibleman and Christian rock are the spiritual equivalent of New Coke. Christian trinkets—a WWJD bracelet, a “God is my DJ” T-shirt—function more like Coca-Cola T-shirts or those cute stuffed polar bears. They telegraph to the community that the wearer is a proud Christian and that this is a cool thing to be—which should, in theory, invite eager curiosity.

This is significant because, according to research by The Barna Group, 61 percent of twentysomethings were “spiritually active” teens but have since lost their religion. Christians leaders see culture as the new channel through which to reach the lost and distracted. Radosh writes:

A less reliable statistic—but one that has galvanized pastors who believe it reflects what they see in the pews—is that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of today’s Christian teens will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults.

“Less reliable” is far too generous. That factoid is pure fiction. But, nonetheless, Christian culture can increase the fervency of the faithful, something I saw countless times as a teen at P.O.D. and Dogwood concerts (the latter for which I actually skipped my senior prom). They may not be the best musicians, but their message often carries more weight than typical Christian influencers.

As Radosh relays in the first few words of the book when describing a concert on a rural Kansas airfield:

A lanky teenager made his way out of the crow and ran to where his friends were waiting on the periphery, sweat smearing his thick black eyeliner. “Awesome performance.” He grinned broadly. “They prayed like three times in a twenty-minute set.”

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May 14, 2008 | 1:12 am

Does all God’s creation include aliens?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This news from the Vatican‘s chief astronomer probably caught the pope’s attention, and that is one boss I would not want to irritate.

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, says that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

In an interview published Tuesday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes says that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures.

The interview was headlined “The extraterrestrial is my brother.” Funes said that ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom.

I’ve written before about whether God could have created aliens and, if so, what it would mean to a handful of religions. Raelians would be stoked and I imagine Scientologists would say they knew it all along.

As a Christian, I have no problem with this, though I struggle to understand whether these other beings could also be saved by a messiah —little “m” because it couldn’t possibly by the same Messiah. Could it?

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May 13, 2008 | 4:43 pm

‘Zionist bigots like you, Mr. Greenberg’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Most of the e-mail I have received about my profile of Kevin MacDonald, the Cal State Long Beach professor whose books on Jews have been compared to ‘Mein Kampf,” has been tame and complimentary, most of all from MacDonald, who wrote me Thursday night:

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised. I was really worried about a hatchet job and this definitely was not that. There were a few things that I would rephrase or provide a somewhat different context, but I suppose that’s what all interviewees say.

His chief adversary, Jeff Blutinger, told me the response has been “overwhelmingly positive.”

Thanks for making his gobbledy gook intelligible through your use of clear language.

But Anti-Zionist Wayne, similar to this “analysis” by John de Nugent, shared a different perspective in an e-mail I just received. He begins by thanking me for notifying him about MacDonald, whose books he now intends to buy. Wayne then lambastes me for my alleged desire to curb freedom of speech (nowhere in the article did I suggest this) and informs me that “this IS

AMERICA

. . . IT’S

NOT

  FACIST  ISRAEL (a nation OF Jews, BY Jews, FOR Jews) !”

He concludes with this thoughtful observation:

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May 13, 2008 | 2:40 pm

American Jews and Israelis: brothers from different mothers

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Kvetching in PresenTense about being a “single, twenty-something Jewish coquette” expected to marry a nice Jewish boy, my friend Rachel Axelbank explains why she finds herself much more attracted to Israelis. As a point of reference, she mentions the guards who issued our security clearance before we met last summer with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert—they apparently shot her glances that I, fortunately, didn’t receive—and quotes Jon Stewart on the differences between our Jews and theirs:

“You have American Jews, who are the ‘let me help you with your tax return’ Jews,” he said. “And you have Israeli Jews, who are the ‘hold my machine gun while I take a leak’ Jews.”

Anyone want to argue with that wisdom?

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May 13, 2008 | 1:43 pm

Rev. Hagee apologizes to Catholic League

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Yawn.

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May 13, 2008 | 12:53 pm

‘God’ speaks about wanting a new name

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

When I wrote last week about Steve Kreuscher, the man from Zion who wants to legally change his name to “In God We Trust,” I cross-posted the article at the CT Liveblog. I was just checking comments there, and I saw that awaiting approval was one from Kreuscher.

The following is the whole reasoning behind me wanting to change my name to “In God We Trust;  So that You know the whole truth about why I am doing it and see that I am more down to earth, then you probably thought at first.

“I have been a very creative artist since 1967.  I have been searching for a new powerful and meaningful signature for my artwork, for the last 10 years.  I was looking for a signature, which would best express my charactor of “Trust In God”, my life of “Trust In God” and most of my artworks, which faithfully express my “Trust In God” also.

“Being born and raised in Zion Illinois, the city which the world renown faith healer, Dr. John Alexander Dowie, founded in 1900, I had a stong “Trust In God”  since childhood.  But then at 23 years old, I had a very dramatic spiritual experience and full whole hearted conversion to Christ, in October 1973, which is also the title of one of my very important works; “October 1973, My Conversion”.  Most of my artworks since my conversion, are very deeply religious.  Being very religious, those artworks faithfully express my “Trust In God”.  Also many of those artworks express powerful stories about many tribulations that I went through in my life and how God used those trials to develope and increase that “Trust In Him” to where it is today.

  “Therefore, changing my name to “In God We Trust” is my newest creative artwork; painted not with paint, but instead with those beautiful, powerful and meaningful words, on the canvas of my life.  Those words “In God We Trust” most truely and most faithfully express me and who I am, in a beautiful creative word painting, a million times better, than the name Steve Kreuscher does.

  “Those beautiful words are now the person, who God has made me into, by “the free riches of His power and His grace, In Christ Jesus” , my Lord and Savior

  “And finally, by taking those precious words as my new name, I am joining those beautiful words, which are so dear to me, in a permanent way, to myself, preserving them for myself as part of me for ever.”

Needless to say, My four children, my five grandchildren and myself need all the prayers and support that you can give us, for God’s Divine protection, wisdom, strength and any thing else that God knows we will need through this all, and especially on Friday the 13th of June.  I would love to see June 13th to be made into the offical “In God We Trust” day here in America.  And last of all, my hopes and prayers are that Christians, all over America and all over the world, on that day figure out some creative, loving, peaceful way to take there own little personal stand for “In God We Trust” on that day. 

      All my love “In Christ Jesus, our Lord and Savior”;  Steve Kreuscher ( In God We Trust )

Kreuscher had me for a minute. Sort of. And then he mentioned Friday the 13th.

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