Category: Book Review
Journalist takes governments to task for not acting against polygamous communities. The research and Bramham’s patient laying out of the facts goes a long way to explaining how a normal society ignores the illegal — and immoral — exploitation of children practiced by a messianic cult.
When describing each phenomenon, J. Gordon Melton’s tone whipsaws between critical and credulous, often without obvious justification.
In 2001, rumors started to hit the blogosphere that Antony Flew, a British philosopher born in 1923, had found God after six decades of atheism. At first Flew denied the reports. But in May 2004 he told a conference in New York that he had indeed changed his mind and become a believer.
You couldn’t beat it for tabloid fodder: Anointed prophet of a secretive evangelical mission-cum-sex cult slits the throat of an ex-nanny, and then kills himself, in protest against the cult leaders, his parents, for years of sex abuse he says he and many other children suffered. And he made a video first.
How did George W. Bush happen? That question has preoccupied the American left for more than six years, producing several shelves of books. Few of the books have been as erudite as Earl Shorris’ “The Politics of Heaven.”
Ultimately, “God Is Not Great” is somewhat of a disappointment — not so much for those who disagree, who will simply be irritated, but for those of us who think that it has an important case to make and were hoping that this might be the book to carry that message to the people.
Historian Ronald Hutton delights in both debunking and celebrating paganism. His new study of the Druids will probably annoy their modern followers, but Gary Lachman finds him unrepentant.
McPherson’s “willingness to engage with American culture … ultimately redefined the relationship among social activism, religion, gender, and the media in the United States.” – MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON In 1906 Azusa Street in Los Angeles shook with worshippers who wept, shouted with joy and spoke in tongues as the Holy Spirit moved them. It was the birth of modern Pentecostalism that today is one of the most potent forces in Christianity. One year later a 17-year-old woman, born to an adherent of the Salvation Army but undergoing a spiritual crisis, came under the spell of one of Pentecostalism’s earliest devotees,
There are two murders in Murder in Amsterdam. The first took place on May 6, 2002, when an animal-rights advocate, for obscure reasons, gunned down Pim Fortuyn, a charismatic politician with a populist program combining law-and-order conservatism, opposition to immigration and gay liberation. About a year and a half later a young Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, incensed by a film critical of Islam, shot the filmmaker-provocateur Theo van Gogh dead in broad daylight. As a parting gesture, he pinned a manifesto to the twitching body with a knife. It was all, as the prime minister of the Netherlands put
BRAINWASH: The Secret History of Mind Control by Dominic Streatfeild Hodder £20 pp440 “Brainwashing paranoia,” writes Dominic Streatfeild, “is horribly contagious.” The term brainwashing was invented in 1950 by the journalist Edward Hunter in an article in the Miami Daily News. It seems to have come from the Chinese xi-nao or “mind cleanse”, a sort of Mutt and Jeff routine used by the communists to convince doubters of the wonders of the revolution. The word caught on. Indeed, as Streatfeild shows in this marvellously engrossing book, it caught on to the
