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The Sacred and the Dead: Truckin’ as a New American Pilgrimage

By Varun Soni

…the Grateful Dead collectively formed an intentionally itinerant community numbering in the tens of thousands, with their own customs, vernacular, art, and economy. In his explanation of the lure of the Grateful Dead to thousands of Deadheads around the country, Garcia ruminated, “maybe we’re just one of the last adventures in America.” Indeed, the promise of a great American adventure animated Deadheads to undertake an annual pilgrimage across th…

London Calling: “Our Great War Is a Spiritual War”

By Elizabeth Drescher

…of much of the heated banter on the uprisings on the Facebook fan page of trip hop duo Massive Attack, where one fan drew something of a spiritual assessment from the film Fight Club: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is o…

More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e group did not get a private meeting with Pope Francis, but was given VIP tickets to the pope’s weekly audience in St. Peter’s square. Religion News Service reports that several bishops, including “San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone – point man or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ battle against gay marriage – had written a letter to the Vatican on their behalf.” A group of LGBT Catholics from London who met up with the New Ways…

Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…alone. Consider an America where politicians don’t preach.” “The Treaty of Tripoli!” someone shouts from the audience. “Absolutely,” Silverman answers. “Educate yourselves and others. The Treaty of Tripoli makes it absolutely clear that John Adams, a founding father, did not consider America a Christian nation.” “Our battle is against religion, not believers. They are sincere people who have been brainwashed since birth,” Silverman continues. H…

The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

By Kaya Oakes

…nage to escape into it enough to imagine yourself getting up and spinning around like a Sufi, you don’t see what’s around you at the moment. The contextual misogyny endemic to almost any music of the ’60s drops away. You don’t see tie dye, or skulls, or swirling skirts. You see a vision of something else. Sufi Dervishes spin to “testify to God’s existence, unity, majesty and power.” Deadheads spin to see what they can of Utopia, Heaven, Paradise….

Bad News for LGBT Anglicans, Mormons, Adventists, Norwegians, Russians, Georgians, Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Saudis…

By Peter Montgomery

…other places would be absolutely catastrophic. Everything we say here goes round the world.” As the Guardian report noted, Anglican churches in Uganda and Nigeria have backed the brutal new criminal penalties imposed on gay people in those countries. Mormons: Apostle Affirms Commitment to One Man-One Woman Marriage Mormon Apostle Neil Andersen, speaking at a biannual national conference in Salt Lake City, affirmed the church’s opposition to same-s…

A Life After Death Double-Feature: Eastwood’s Hereafter and Noe’s Enter the Void

By Jay Michaelson

…of seeing many. It’s not like 2001 or A Clockwork Orange, films which are “trippy” in style or genre—it actually is a psychedelic trip. Noe uses strobe effects and other visual techniques to place the viewer in an altered state of consciousness—when my friend and I emerged onto the street, blinking, we realized we’d been tripping for two hours. Enter the Void is told from the point of view of a young man, Oscar, who dies five minutes into the film…

Why Did the Pope Choose Cuba?

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…ost important question of all: Why did the Pope decide to visit Cuba? This trip is Benedict XVI’s first, and many say only, visit to Spanish-speaking Latin America, where the majority of Catholics live. The choice of Mexico, with the second-largest Catholic population globally, seems obvious. What isn’t obvious is the decision to visit this island nation where Catholicism has struggled for the past 50 years. The answer is found in the verb tense….

What Does the ‘Traditional Family’ Have To Do with Pussy Riot?

By Gillian Kane

…havior,” and “propensity for protest reactions.” A few months after the DC trip, both Hilarion and Kirill endorsed a regional meeting in Moscow hosted by the US-organized World Congress of Families, an international conservative network dedicated to defending traditional values and the “natural family.” In his comments, Hilarion echoed the goals from the DC trip, advocating for “a strategic alliance of Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and tradition…

Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

By Kathryn Joyce

…rs that followed are now at or approaching retirement; some are ill, and a number doubt how much they can physically invest this time around. Diane Wahto, a former college English instructor and co-founder of a pro-choice flash protest group called ZAP, described herself as an active “foot soldier” for the movement, staging guerilla demonstrations (like tying tampons to former Operation Rescue head Randall Terry’s car) well into her 50s. But she d…