By now, it is clear that Joel Osteen’s carelessness is deliberate and calculated.

Predictably, Mormonism is in the news again. The presence of two members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints among contenders for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination ensured that it was only a matter of time before Evangelicals, along with other Americans, began to talk openly about what this means for the nation, the church, and the stewardship of political responsibility in the voting booth.

What sociology cannot do is deal with the most important question of all — the truth question.

My concluding article in the Beliefnet.com dialogue, “Are Mormons ‘Christians?,‘” is now posted and can be found here. An excerpt:

The debate over the question, “Are Mormons ‘Christians?,’” continues at Beliefnet.com. My second article was published Thursday and I look forward to reading the response by Orson Scott Card. The debate can be found here.

Are Mormons Christians? Beliefnet.com invited me to debate that issue with Orson Scott Card, a prominent Mormon author. The exchange is already interesting and we will see how it develops. You can find the debate here.

The question for this week at “On Faith,” the joint project of The Washington Post and Newsweek magazine, is this: After 175 years of existence, is Mormonism entering the mainstream of American religious life or are people still suspicious of it?

Observing the landscape of America’s contentious debate over marriage, scholar Stanley Kurtz of the Hudson Institute, remarks, “It has become necessary to offer a case against polygamy.” That such a claim would appear so utterly reasonable in our times is a clear sign that marriage is in big trouble. That trouble is not, for the most part, localized on the issue of polygamy, but the question of polygamy hangs over current controversies concerning same-sex marriage and the legal status of marriage as a social institution. In today’s Commentary, Dr. Mohler considers Kurtz’s new article in the current edition of the Weekly Standard.

Media critic Neal Gabler has suggested that popular entertainment is turning the nation into a giant transcontinental soap opera. Individual citizens are creating “life movies” starring themselves, and the entertainment industry has become “a force so overwhelming that it has finally metastasized into life.” Today, Dr. Albert Mohler argues that television, in its attempts to portray the margins of society as (almost) normal, is fueling a moral revolution.

December 23, 2005 marks 200 years since the birth of Joseph Smith. Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was born in Vermont, but was raised in the region of western New York known as the “Burned-Over District” because of the fierce religious debates that scalded the area in the wake of the Second Great Awakening. As historian and biographer Robert Remini remarked, “Joseph Smith, Jr., was born into a wildfire of religious frenzy that raged over large parts of the United States in the early nineteenth century and influenced virtually every aspect of American life and thought.”