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Russia Expels Gay American Pastor, An Epidemic of Anti-LGBT Violence in Brazil, And More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…n incurable illness” and that such people “must be isolated from society.” Belize: Chief Justice again postpones ruling on sodomy challenge Activists in Belize have been waiting for more than three years for Chief Justice Kenneth Benjamin to deliver a judgment in the United Belize Action Movement’s challenge to the country’s sodomy laws. The court had announced that the ruling would be delivered on July 27, but on that day the court announced that…

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

By Sarah M. Pike

…eligious pilgrimage. Time and space are said to be different in Black Rock City. No one was talking on cell phones, clocks were largely invisible, and the city’s layout reoriented participants with its semi-circular streets running from A to L. This year the letters marked various rites of passage: Anniversary, Birthday, Coming Out, Divorce, Engagement, Funeral, Graduation, Hajj, Initiation, Journey, Kindergarten, and Liminal. Bisecting the rites…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…ou’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us ou…

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…tion studio. Nor is it the first. A studio called Unplug opened in 2014 in Los Angeles. Deepak Chopra has taught a class there. Good Morning America recently included Unplug in a segment on mindfulness. The studio was opened by a longtime editor at Glamour, Suze Yalof Schwartz. In a phone interview, Yalof Schwartz said that she decided to open the studio when she couldn’t easily find a place to learn meditation. I asked Yalof Schwartz how Unplug d…

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…black theologians, including Cone, actually tend to reject Marxism as a philosophical source. It is too white, too Western and, tends to include only economic class, not race, in its power analysis. Cone’s theological sources are the bible and black experience. If one is going to argue against his theology, one must argue against these sources not Marx. So far, Beck has said nothing about black experience and nearly everything he has claimed about…

Oscar Watch: Why Spike Jonze’s Her Is Not About Technology

By Daniel Pecchenino

…r future is its absence of sacred space. Anyone who has spent much time in Los Angeles knows that it’s hard to go a block without seeing a Catholic church, synagogue, Protestant chapel (be it Korean, African-American, or conservative Iowan), storefront iglesia, Mormon ward, ashram, or some building owned by the Scientologists. The City of Angels was also home to one of the strangest and most important evangelists of the 20th century, Sister Aimee…

Spiritual Unplugging, Or What to Do When There is Wifi at the Ashram

By Matt Hamilton

…ok pictures with her phone as we attempted the warrior pose. Was I back in Los Angeles? Why wasn’t this different? The staff—all devotees of the Ananda movement, a Hindu spiritual fellowship founded in northern California during the late 60s—only reinforced feelings of familiarity. There was Jemal, the dreadlocked, Yale-educated monk who waxed philosophic about the “sublime” benefits of a celibate lifestyle. There was Shivani, a Jewish girl from O…

Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…ork of its titular character, a metaphysical noir detective who lives in a Los Angeles that exists in a space equally with the dimensions of Heaven and Hell. As with Dogma and Good Omens, Constantine engages a certain “bureaucratizing of the sacred,” an understanding of the transcendent realm as reminiscent of the political, social, legal, and economic structures which define our lives. This is, of course, not substantially different from how, dur…

“Papers Please”: The Legal Battle Over Church Sex-Abuse Files

By Omar Shamout

…here, not all judges have ruled in the victims’ favor. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles finally released the 12,000 documents it agreed to make public as part of a 2007 sex-abuse settlement in which the archdiocese and its insurers paid a total of $660 million to over 500 victims. Ray Boucher was the lead plaintiff’s attorney in the civil suit against the L.A. Archdiocese. He says the nearly six-year battle to make the files public was difficult fo…

How Long Does It Take a Man of God to Admit Child Rape is Wrong?

By Joanna Brooks

…mes published a front-page story reporting that Archbishop Roger Mahony of Los Angeles sat on reports of felony-level sexual abuse of children by priests for almost 15 years before he took action, and that the Los Angeles Catholic diocese waited at least 14 years before reporting abuse to law enforcement. The LA Times report was based on letters written by Mahony in 1986 and 1987 recently entered as evidence in a civil suit. More documents will be…