Time's up?
Here's how the New York Post sums up the latest issue of Time in its weekly "On the Newsstand" feature: "Time resorts to one of the oldest gimmicks in the book that still makes for good reading—religion and its role telling the future. Here in New York, we don't encounter too many fundamentalist Christians, but out there in the hinterlands, they're everywhere."

Yes, Time takes on the apocalypse. The cover says "The Bible and the Apocalypse," but don't be fooled: the real book of interest here is the one imagined by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. And really, that's where this cover package falls a bit short. Senior editor at large Nancy Gibbs tries to tie together the popularity of the Left Behind series (which launched in 1999) with the war on terrorism. But while there was a spike in sales after 9/11, Weblog has heard that the series is actually diminishing in sales lately (but Weblog can't confirm this with a link—a little help?).

Why Time's religion writer, David Van Biema, didn't get to write the lead article is unknown. Instead, he's left to write a sidebar on the history of apocalypticism. He again shows that he knows his stuff. Next Time, he should be allowed to write more.

Gibbs shows care in a brief sidebar on evangelicals and Jews—one of the few news articles Weblog has seen that doesn't claim conservative evangelicals are wholly driven by eschatology in their support of Israel. The rest of the cover package, however, seems extraordinarily late for Time. Hasn't everyone either done an article on Left Behind, apocalyptic thought after 9/11, or both together?

Colson: Bar radical imams from visiting prisons In the June 14Christianity Today Weblog, we wondered what Prison Fellowship founder Charles Colson had ...