Harper's Magazine for May 2005 was exceptional, and expect some links to articles when it gets indexed on the website next month. But these two entries had to be posted... let's start with from the Editor's Notebook, "Wrath of the Lamb":

"Advice administered as threat conforms to the ethic of the government currently in office in Washington, consistent not only with the character of the deity portrayed in the Old Testament but also with the modus operandi of the Coreleone and Gambino crime families. Profess loyalty, show respect, launder the money, or expect to wind up whacked or left behind. The born-again capos and underbosses of the Bush Administration (the President himself; Tom DeLay, majority leader in the House; Senators Rick Santorum [R. Pa.] and Sam Brownback [R. Kans.]; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice) make their bones by robbing the poor to pay the rich and holding fast to the doctrine of preemptive strike, as certain as the prophet Ezekiel that on the day of the wrath when the Lord redeems mankind in a flood of purifying fire and a wonder of Hollywood explosions, the faithful and the pure in heart shall find their way home to Paradise.
The guarantee of terrible punishment for God's enemies, combined with the assurance of an ending both happy and profitable for God's business associates, provides the plot for the Left Behind series of Neo-Christian fables (thirteen volumes, 62 million copies sold) that have risen in popularity over the last ten years in concert with the spread of fundamentalist religious belief and the resurrection of the militant Christ. The co-authors of the books, Tim LaHaye and Jerry P. Jenkins, tell the story of the Raptureon that marvelous and forthcoming day when the saved shall be lifted suddenly to heaven and the damned shall writhe in pain; like most of the prophets who have preceded them to the corporate skyboxes of boundless grace, they express their love of God by rejoicing in the hatred of man. Just as the Old Testament devotes many finely wrought verses to the extermination of the Midianites (also to the butchering of all the people and fatted calves in Moab), Lahaye and Jenkins give upward of eighty pages to the wholesale slaughter of apostates in Boston and Los Angeles, the words as fondly chosen as the film footage in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ or the instruments of torture in a seventeen century Catholic prison. The twelfth book in the series delight in the spectacle of divine retribution at the battle of Armageddon: "Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving glory of the Christ.""