New Apostolic Reformation...and false idols?

In a recent Fresh Air episode, Terry Gross interviewed Rachel Tabanchnick, a journalist who has done some diligent research on the New Apostolic Reformation--the group who sponsored Rick Perry's recent prayer day and a movement that Sarah Palin has apparently been part of. Listen to the episode here.



Among the leaders of NAR is John Benefiel, who has stirred up some dust by declaring that the Statue of Liberty is a demonic idol. The clip above replays that particular statement.



As is clear from other posts I have written here, I have an interest in civil religion and the construction of a national faith. So hearing Benefiel single our the Statue of Liberty for being a symbol that detracts from worship of a "true" faith is not too surprising. Likewise, his claim that freedom derives only from God and through Jesus is also not unusual, as Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals (until relatively recently) had been leveling similar critiques about secular society for quite some time.



I am curious, though, to hear if others have seen a critique of the NAR from Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals. Watchers of the Christian Right have certainly contributed to the heightened scrutiny of this group, but have Jim Wallis or Stanley Hauerwas and those among evangelical and fundamentalist Christian intellectuals--loosely defined--weighed in? I ask this because the NAR strikes me as another version of Pat Robertson's army from the 1988 primary season and perhaps Christian intellectuals will have a response ready this time. And second, it seems to me that the intent of NAR to unify the disparate denominations of Protestants into a single church might not appeal to megachurch leaders but sounds similar to some of the critiques Haerwas has made about liberal and conservative Protestantism.



What do others make of this movement and its relationship to Christian intellectuals?

The All-TIME 100 Best Non-Fiction Books

That's "TIME" as in TIME Magazine. And "All-TIME" as in "written in English since TIME started publishing in 1923" (so no surprise appearances from Lucretius, Judah Halevi, Margaret Fuller or J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur).

TIME magazine published their list yesterday. While obviously of limited real significance and predictably full of questionable inclusions and exclusions, this is obvious U.S. Intellectual History fodder, as a starting point both for endless arguments about what should and shouldn't be on the list and for discussions of what this all says about American thought and culture in 2011.

Have at it! (Complete list after the fold...)

Autobiography / Memoir

• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein


• Black Boy by Richard Wright


• Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama


• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers


• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou


• Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown


• Maus by Art Spiegelman


• A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway


• Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin


• On Writing by Stephen King


• Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov


• A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Biography

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley


• The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill by William Manchester


• The Power Broker by Robert Caro

Business

• Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman


• Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser


• The General Theory by John Maynard Keynes


• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie


• No Logo by Naomi Klein


• Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader


• What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles

Culture

• The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris


• A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht


• Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow


• Mystery Train by Greil Marcus


• The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich

Essays

• Against Interpretation, and Other Essays by Susan Sontag


• A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf


• Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion


• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

Food Writing

• How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher


• Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child


• The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Health

• And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts


• The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock


• The Joy of Sex by Dr. Alex Comfort


• The Kinsey Reports by Alfred Kinsey


• Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective

History

• The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam


• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown


• Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter


• The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes


• The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels


• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee


• A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn


• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer

Ideas

• The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom


• The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama


• Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter


• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell


• Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson


• The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr


• Orientalism by Edward Said


• Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky


• A Theory of Justice by John Rawls


• Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan


• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

Nonfiction Novels

• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe


• The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer


• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote


• Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

Politics

• All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein


• The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington


• Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater


• God & Man at Yale by William F. Buckley Jr.


• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell


• The Making of the President by Theodore White


• The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt


• The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter


• What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer

Science

• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking


• Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead


• The Double Helix by James Watson


• The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee


• The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas


• The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris


• On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson


• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins


• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson


• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

Self-Help / Instructional

• The Big Book by Alcoholics Anonymous


• Elements of Style by Strunk and White

Social History

• The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford


• Animal Liberation by Peter Singer


• The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf


• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs


• The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan


• Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond


• Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich


• The Other America by Michael Harrington


• Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King Jr.


• Working by Studs Terkel

Sports

• Ball Four by Jim Bouton


• The Sweet Science by A.J. Liebling

War

• The Civil War by Shelby Foote


• Dispatches by Michael Herr


• The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell


• Hiroshima by John Hersey


• The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright