Weekend Reads 12/24/16

Fake news and fake gospels

I consciously try to take people at their word when they are talking about their religious convictions rather than assuming their beliefs are politics or some other ideology in thin religious trappings. The past year or so has challenged that posture significantly and raised questions about how fellow Christians are so easily taken captive by things like fake news and have such itching ears for fake gospels.

Has the Bonhoeffer Moment Finally Arrived?

The reality, however, is that Bonhoeffer’s early antipathy toward Hitler was regarded with irritation by most Christian leaders in Germany, even among those who opposed the church’s nazification. Bonhoeffer’s contemporaries, in fact, viewed him as an unreasonable partisan who was too uncompromising in church disputes, too quick to criticize the fledgling Nazi state, and too pessimistic about Germany’s auspicious future under Hitler.

Surprise virus in child mummy unravels thousands of years of disease history

In fact, genetic analysis of the preserved smallpox blueprints, published Thursday in Current Biology, suggests that smallpox is just hundreds of years old, not millennia as many had thought. The finding stands to rewrite the virus' storied past.

Meet the New Christian Right, Same as the Old Christian Right

Influential evangelical leaders like Russell Moore have said that evangelicals should get out of the culture war business altogether, a stance that seems especially resonant with younger evangelicals. But as the early weeks of the Trump transition shows, the Christian right is far from dead. It has just mutated into a new, equally virulent form that while perhaps lacking the evangelical foot soldiers who put it on the map in the 1980s, remains able to shape and influence policy just as effectively.