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Mormon Women Knock at the Door, Are Turned Away

By Holly Welker

…e.” Then, as men and boys strode past them into the Tabernacle where they awaited the opportunity to move to the Conference Center where the session would take place, members of Ordain Women lined up individually or in pairs to request and be denied admission by church representative Doug Peterson. According to Mike Stevens of Ogden, Utah, who stood nearby and filmed the exchanges, each woman had a brief exchange with Peterson, along the lines of…

Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

By Andrew Aghapour

…Your Fault, a series on blame in contemporary society by RD’s The Cubit. AA: Is it fair to say that the psychological mechanisms we use for blaming are tuned for judging human individuals? BM: Yes. Because that’s the only place, and the only context, in which we can actually learn this. The way my research group has thought for a while about how blame emerges developmentally and gets refined in the course of growing up in a community, is really…

Pope Praises ‘Complementarity’ & Resists Gay Ambassador; Irish Religious Leaders Spar Over Marriage; Colombian Atty Gen Cites ‘Bogus’ Study Opposing Adoption; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…who are “devout”, they have dedicated themselves to strengthening their imaan [religious belief] in an attempt to overcome them. The men are part of a small support group which began on a web forum. Some of the members now meet every few months to discuss how they are managing their sexual feelings. In some British Muslim communities, homosexuality can be a controversial issue: some believe the act counts as a form of “zina” – an Arabic term refe…

Paranormal Vodka, Exorcists and a Demonic Doll: Welcome to Paracon, Based on the Work of the Demon-Hunters Who Inspired the ‘Conjuring’ Series

By Eric Harrelson and Joseph P. Laycock

…England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR) Seekers of the Supernatural Paracon as part of our research for our book The Exorcist Effect (named for a phenomenon we discussed in these pages after the release of Conjuring 3). I certainly didn’t expect the crowd. The Paracon, held the weekend before Halloween, is based around the work of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the famous demon-hunting couple whose case files are the basis of the billion-dollar Con…

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

By Matt Hamilton

…chedule interviews. I don’t know how not to do this. Yet here I was at the Ananda Ashram in rural India, expecting (and craving) swift condemnation by the monks and nuns at the sight of an iPhone. I was on a university-sponsored trip to the subcontinent with other journalists, all of us covering politics and religion. The reporting would come later, however. First came three days in an ashram, and I hoped for a 72-hour hiatus from the compulsion t…

Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…!,” between a blurry “photo” and a pull quote informing readers that the “FAA launches top secret investigation into incident.” To those who dismiss any sort of faith in angels, they belong to a category that also includes ghosts and UFO abductions, clairvoyance and Sasquatch. There are reasons for such dismissals, of course. Many pop cultural representations of angels borrow extensively from Victorian sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at re…

Capricology Week 5: Fathers, Funerals, and the Ethics of Gaming

By Henry Jenkins

…on the “magic circle” of game space, and on the conversion of a central character from lost soul to gun-toting avenger—who doesn’t know she’s already dead. See here for the full list of discussions so far, or sign up here for the RSS feed. Diane Winston___________________ “There is another sky ” and this week in Caprica’s iconic closing shot, Tamara Adams walks beneath it. Gun in hand on a deserted New Cap City street, the chilling image of the…

Margaret Thatcher: A Muslim’s Perspective

By Amir Dastmalchian

…asked “So should she really be given a ceremonial funeral like Princess Diana’s?” That Thatcher was divisive is one thing that Britons of all political persuasions can agree on, though given the prayer attributed to Francis of Assisi that she quoted on first becoming Prime Minister, it is a little ironic. “‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony…” she recited. As the funeral and the legacy of Thatcher is being debated in Britain, and as ag…

Peter Berger, Sociology’s Defender of God (1929-2017)

By Mark Juergensmeyer

Years ago when I was co-directing the Berkeley-Harvard program in comparative religion our conference in Cambridge had divided into two camps, the ethical relativists and the ethical absolutists. Peter Berger was on the side of the absolutists. The discussion came to the case of sati, the practice in India of widow-burning, where the grieving widow was supposed to throw herself onto the funeral pyre of her departed husband and achieve a kind of d…

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

By Sarah M. Pike

…festival is simply an occasion to don outrageous costumes, dance the night away, and encounter mind-blowing art and people. But for those “Burners” who are true converts, it is a religious event on a massive scale. Casseopeia, a 28-year-old adjunct professor at a large state university told me that Burning Man is her only “religious holiday.” For true believers, mundane life pales in comparison to this annual Labor Day gathering in Nevada’s Black…