It’s a busy weekend for me, but I hope folks get a chance to check out what sounds like a Most Excellent book about religion in America today. Posner looks to have done some great research, and the Alternet excerpt is especially useful, on this day when ’religious voters’ in the Black community are on the verge of handing Obama a needed victory. “And what does it profit a man to gain the whole world…” heh.

nside the Trinity Christian Church in Irving, Texas, a crowd starts gathering in the afternoon for a Victory Healing and Miracle Service that is to begin at 7 p.m. that evening. People have traveled from as far away as Ohio and Arkansas and Georgia to participate. Most are waiting in the perimeter lobby of the church, camping out with pillows and Bibles, ordering pizza, and waiting for an event that has been hyped on Christian television for months. I approach one woman, an African American member of televangelist Rod Parsley’s World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio. Judging from her clothes, the woman could scarcely afford the plane ticket she bought to see a performance of the preaching phenomenon whose services she can attend three times a week at home in Columbus. She’s almost in a trance, barely able to focus on me or what I am asking her, and she brushes me aside as I inquire about her journey.  Read more