Sandro Magister is a Vaticanologist and an Italian journalist whose website, Chiesa, has an English-language archive of Magister’s insider essays on the Vatican, including all the developments of Benedict’s papacy.

Ivana Noble is an associate professor of the Ecumenical Institute of ETF UK at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. She has taught fundamental theology, systematic theology, and philosophy at The Institute of Ecumenical Studies, Protestant Theological Faculty and International Baptist Theological Seminary. Her main interests are the relationship between theology and culture, ecumenism and […]

The national headquarters for the United Methodist Church in Barcelona, Spain.

Read a July 1, 2004, article by Carlin Flora about celebrity worship syndrome. It’s posted on the Psychology Today Web site.

Read a July 12, 2009, essay at ReligionDispatches.org about the aftermath of Michael Jackson’s death by Pauline Hope Cheong, an associate professor at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.

Read a June 29, 2009, post at the First Things blog by Richard Scott Nokes, who argues that the singer is “a martyr to our culture’s true god: Celebrity.”

Read a June 26, 2009, Beliefnet column remembering Michael Jackson by Deepak Chopra.

Read a June 26, 2009, commentary on Michael Jackson’s death at The Huffington Post by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the popular writer and a friend of Jackson’s.

Read a June 25, 2009, column at ReligionDispatches.org about the passing of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett by Anthea Butler, a historian of American and African-American religion who specializes in popular culture. In the piece, she describes Jackson as “a pop theologian.”