Religion

Windham, N.H.
The auditorium at Windham High School seats 660, but the fire marshal tells me the crowd for Rick Santorum’s fifth event on Thursday overflowed with more than 700 in attendance. But even with this big audience, Santorum looks tired and gives a low energy, pedestrian performance.

The archbishop of Canterbury is going to resign next year. At least that’s the story making the rounds of newspapers in London, and the interesting part is not that the 61-year-old Rowan Williams should be willing to give up another decade in the job. Or even, if the Telegraph is right, that the clergy and his fellow bishops are working to push him out.

On Sunday, the Episcopal Church’s National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. will host “A Call to Compassion” to commemorate 9/11.  President Obama will attend and speak at the concluding “Concert for Hope.”  Patti LaBelle will sing. CNN’s Anderson Cooper will host. After the recent earthquake and the collapse of a crane, the cathedral has gone “on the road” and relocated its 9/11 events to a nearby synagogue and the Kennedy Center.  Controversy has surrounded the cathedral’s choice of spiritual representatives.

Republican presidential candidate Buddy Roemer believes he's gaining momentum. "My best fundraising week was last week," the former governor and congressman from Louisiana tells Slate's Dave Weigel. "I raised enough money to buy a ticket to one of Obama's fundraisers."

Ace of Spades: "Bill Keller Of The NY Times Wants His Readers To Know Most Of The GOP Candidates Are Crazy Religious Nuts"

Dave Weigel: "Why Tea Party candidates won't win any elections next year: because mainstream Republicans now spout the same ideas."

First Read: "Primary calendar chaos?"

Winning the sweepstakes for the most hysterical piece of political journalism in recently is no mean feat, but I think Joshua Green at The Atlantic might have done it:

Michele Bachmann's Church Says the Pope Is the Antichrist

A liberal group has grabbed a number of headlines in the past week by attacking Paul Ryan's budget plan as un-Christian. The group claims that Ryan's a devotee of the atheist Ayn Rand, whose values are explicitly anti-Christian, and that this is the real inspiration for Ryan's budget:

From the New York Times article announcing that Jill Abramson is replacing Bill Keller as the paper's executive editor:

"In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” she said. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth."

Good and Bad Ways to Think About Religion and Politics
by Robert Benne
Eerdmans, 128 pp., $14

"U.S., allies see Libyan rebels in hopeless disarray"

Brings new meaning to "Rainbow Coalition."

Roger Simon says Obama didn't give a serious fiscal speech so much as try and shore up his Democratic base.

This has got to be a metaphor for something, right?

Palin says she's "through whining about the liberal press." Well, at least until they say she's complicit in murder again, anyway.

Over the last several years the old religious right reputedly has been melting down, with younger, more liberal evangelicals in the ascendency. But exit polling from the 2010 midterm election indicate no major political shift among evangelical or Protestant voters.