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The Road to Decriminalization of Psychoactive Drugs Runs Through Religion

By Brad Stoddard

…of União do Vegetal (or Union of the Plants), a small religious group from South America, can legally consume a psychedelic tea called hoasca (or ayahuasca), an otherwise illegal psychoactive drug, during twice-monthly rituals. Based largely on the Supreme Court’s decision, three years later a lower court ruled that members of a similar religion in Oregon have a religious right to consume what they call Daime, a variation of the base ingredients u…

Why President Obama Should Not Visit the Western Wall

By Melissa Weininger

…997, the women have been allowed to pray at Robinson’s Arch, a site to the south of the Wall, but not at the Wall itself. Every month, the Women of the Wall continue to meet and pray together on Rosh Chodesh, and periodically some of them are arrested, typically for a short period, and released. In February, however, the organization was catapulted into the news when Rabbi Susan Silverman, the sister of the American comedian Sarah Silverman, was a…

Obama in India: Missed Opportunities

By Anna Bigelow

…on with Muslim leaders like Abdul Ghaffar Khan—a man whose legacy as a nonviolent activist and peacemaker would serve as a powerful response to young South Asians seeking a model of a peaceful jihad for freedom and justice….

Meet the “New Age” Stephen Colbert

By Andrew Aghapour

…I recently visited this New Age Stephen Colbert at his home in Charleston, South Carolina to find out, among other things, how he balances comic and spiritual concerns that appear to be at odds with one another. Note: this interview has been edited for clarity and length. What does it mean to be Ultra Spiritual? Ultra Spiritual is the practice of looking spiritual and getting other people to notice how spiritual you look. Does this reflect a cultu…

Black Churches are Burning: Is It the 1990s All Over Again?

By Katie Day

…by arson or bombing in two and a half years. One third were predominantly African American churches in the south. They were able to get civil rights convictions for racial hate crimes in 60 percent of the cases in five Southern states and Nevada. In subsequent years, the numbers fell: there were 209 church arsons in 1997 and 166 the following year, according to their annual reports. The last report was issued in 2001. Altogether there were almost…

Welcome to the (New) Gilded Age: Supreme Court Delivers the Goods to Corporations

By Peter Laarman

…isenfranchising the actual persons the 14th Amendment was designed to help—African Americans—has not been lost on historians. Three years earlier, in 1883, the Court had invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875; ten years later in Plessy v. Ferguson, it would formally validate the infamous “separate but equal” doctrine. What makes that Gilded Age dramatically different from our own, however, is that in 1886 there were powerful social movements pus…

Mumbai, Five Months After: Searching for a Coherent Stance on Religious Violence

By Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad

…sly unknown group whose name implied that it was from the Deccan region of south-central India, which has a significant Muslim population. With what to Indian eyes seemed a maddeningly misplaced skepticism, the Western media remained neutral about the origin of the men, despite offering no alternative explanation. During the event, it was a British newspaper, the Observer, that traced the surviving man to a rural part of Pakistan. In Pakistan, off…

Death Penalty, Debated (Dedicated to the Memory of Sarah Horowitz)

By Bill Berkowitz

…shment and compiles annual statistics, reports that for the most part only Southern states resumed executions. Ohio, which carried out two, was the only state outside the South to impose the death penalty in 2008.” (See the DPIC’s “The Death Penalty in 2008: Year End Report” for more information). “2008 can only be characterized as yet another rollercoaster year for the death penalty in Texas,” said TCADP Executive Director Kristin Houle. “The sta…

The Gutting of ‘Roe’ isn’t About Religion, it’s a Product of White Terror

By Sikivu Hutchinson

…jority of African Americans support safe and legal access to abortion. And African American women have the highest rate of abortion amongst all groups of American women. The reasons are not mysterious—Black women are disproportionately poor, under-employed, single and living in highly segregated communities with limited health care access which have borne the brunt of the economic depression. Due to slavery and the violent legacy of Jim Crow, Blac…

The Myth of the Maya Apocalypse

By Evan Pondel

…icant uptick in searches for one-way flights to airports near towns in the South of France and Turkey (both of which are rumored to be safe havens from the apocalypse), so everyone from scholars to journalists to NASA—even the Vatican—continue to quell worries and debunk myths. Well before we began to approach the actual date, the Maya apocalypse hysteria inspired Mark Van Stone, an expert in Mayan hieroglyphics, to write 2012: Science and Prophe…