Features
Spiritual warfare: At the World Prayer Center
I thought the reference to the queen of heaven might mean Mary, but it turned out I was wrong. A glance at commentaries on Jeremiah 7:18 revealed that she was the Assyro-Babylonian Ishtar, the goddess of war and fertility introduced to Judah by King Manasseh. At the World Prayer Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the queen of heaven is viewed as "one of the most powerful spirits in Satan's hierarchy," according to WPC president C. Peter Wagner. For Wagner and the WPC, confronting the queen of heaven with the proclamation that Jesus Christ is Lord is a central and defining task.
Books
Care and counseling
Cultivating Wholeness, by Margaret Kornfeld...
Generation J, by Lisa Schiffman
Lisa Schiffman's spiritual quest culminates in a tattoo, inked into her shoulder blade, of a leafy vine running through a Star of David....
Ending the era of Auschwitz
The Holocaust in American Life, by Peter Novick...
Departments
The angelic taxi
Cuban film director Fernando Pérez was inspired to make Life Is to Whistle by the work of modernist painter René Magritte, in whose work "reality does not stop being reality, but is, at once, another reality." Magritte's paintings have be...
China syndrome: Authoritarian habits
The People's Republic of China marked its 50th anniversary on October 1, and in preparation for the occasion China's Communist Party did more than spruce up the streets of Beijing....
Consider the lilies
When I travel, I like to bring treasures home with me. I have four carved wooden masks I bought in Kenya, and one of the Buddha I found in Katmandu....
Island spaces
Ile le petit Detroit, "Detroit Island," was our home for 11 summers. We and a dozen friends bought the better part of the island in 1970, and the Martys built a little home there and enjoyed it through 1981....
Lectionary
Pledging allegiance: Matthew 22:15-22
Are service to God and to Caesar compatible?