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The Horror Mugabe Doesn’t Want the World to See

…ey were quickly dispersed by heavily armed, helmeted riot police (see cell phone photo, top). “If they catch you,” one student matter of factly told Donaghue at the buffet, “you are going to be cut like a goat from head to toe.” The students all knew people who had been beaten or tortured by Mugabe’s agents. Donaghue met one receiving treatment in a hospital, most of which are now closed, partly because even when staff are paid, “it costs more to…

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Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…

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Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…

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The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…

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An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?)   The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…

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Burying the Future: Youth Violence in Chicago

…Walcott Avenue to be exact). It’s become a statistic to keep track of: the number of school-age children who are murdered, sometimes on school grounds, during a school year, which means the academic year is properly hyphenated. The punctuation gives bone to the unholy facts, but it also creates another set of suburban record-keeping to conjure with. In other words, it makes the reality more abstract, a bit easier to study as citizens. I teach in D…

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Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…

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The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required

…esus is Coming, Look Busy. During the last week of January 2015, police in Utah concluded their investigation of the September deaths the Strack family in Springville, Utah. An older son of Kristi Strack found his mother, along with Benjamin Strack and the couple’s three children, all dead. The announcement concluded that the parents’ deaths were suicides, and that the couple had killed the two youngest children. The way the eldest child died, a 1…

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Some Mormons See a Message in the Angel Moroni’s Fallen Trumpet

…cement that “In the coming weeks, based upon world conditions, substantial numbers of missionaries will likely need to be returned to their home nations to continue their service.” Rod Meldrum, author of Prophecies and Promises: The Book of Mormon and the United States of America, is particularly sure of this connection. On March 20, he is quoted as saying: “And so it begins. First Moroni’s trumpet is removed from the SLC temple, heralding the end…

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Immigration in Our Lovely Deseret

…First published in 1850 in the provisional state of Deseret (later renamed Utah territory), the Church-owned Deseret News is read by many Mormons living beyond the state of Utah and held in special regard as an especially authoritative “Mormon” take on the news. Sensitivity to immigration issues among Mormons—Anglo, Latino, and otherwise—is heightened by the fact that the Church’s strongest growth in the U.S. over the last decade has been among La…

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