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Burma’s Spirit Festival, and More in This Week’s Global LGBT Roundup

By Peter Montgomery

…rbán, who has warned LGBT people against becoming “provocative,” and with any number of European populists who promise a return to a mythical “traditional” past. Gessen notes that a year ago she wrote that she believed Trump would target the LGBT community ”because its acceptance is the most clear and drastic social change in America of the last decade, so an antigay campaign would capture the desire to return to a time in which Trump’s constituen…

Occupy Francis Lewis Boulevard

By Haroon Moghul

My barbers are, like many others in New York City, Jewish and Uzbek. I get my trim while listening to Russian-speaking Central Asians scream into their cell phones, all of which are so much cooler than mine; this particular virtual argument was about an order for an organic something that didn’t go through. I guess. Then halfway through my haircut, a South Asian man walks into the barbershop and sits two chairs down from me. He’s wearing a dark b…

Free Will, Fate and FiveThirtyEight: The Theology of Election Polls

By Alan Levinovitz and Michael Schulson

…l a distinct kind of expertise and certainty. Other outlets, including the New York Times and Daily Kos, have launched similar forecasts. What’s the appeal of quantifying the future? What should we make of these technological oracles? RD associate editor Michael Schulson and Alan Levinovitz, an RD contributor and a professor of Chinese philosophy and religion at James Madison University, got together online to chat about fate, uncanniness, and pro…

I Was Wrong About Occupy

By Donna Schaper

…ormitory space for occupiers. They need to be outside and together. What they want is “the right to see each other.” Radical. Will all this community result in a just economy? How could it not? Governor Cuomo has called a special session of the New York state legislature to deal with the millionaire’s tax—something he would likely not have done if some people weren’t occupying physical space, in New York City and Albany and Los Angeles and Philade…

Silver Bells and Atheist Billboards

By Steve A. Wiggins

…” ones like “Winter Wonderland.” Pushing through the doors into the chilly New York air with Johnny Mathis singing “Silver Bells” overhead, it strikes me that I have just experienced a tiny cross-section of America’s ongoing cultural crisis. We want it both ways—I realize as I pass the Wired store in Times Square—we want to reap all the benefits of secular science while keeping the comforts of a medieval spirituality. I had returned from the Ameri…

An Open Letter to Rabbi Dov Linzer on Modesty and Jewish Law

By Shaul Magid

…their spiritual progeny are stricter regarding women’s modesty as a way to minimize unleashing male desire. The reverse is simply not the case. Thus it is women who must sacrifice comfort for that desire—even though the Talmud argues, as you say, that male control of their desire rests on their shoulders. One legitimate argument against the ultra-Orthodox in Beit Shemesh that categorically distinguishes them from the Modern Orthodox is that while…

Let My Preachers Endorse: A Modest Church-State Proposal

By Michael Leo Owens

…ry! VOTE REPUBLICAN!”; while church bulletins of St. Catherine of Siena in New York included a pro-Romney message from former U.S. ambassadors to the Vatican. The 1500 congregations supporting Pulpit Freedom Sunday, which included Black churches, endorsed an array of local, state, and federal candidates. And they’ll continue to do so. “It’s their prerogative, it’s their opinion, it’s their church,” observed a resident of the Texas town where Churc…

Nxivm Scam Is Dead, but ‘Brainwashing’ Pseudoscience Lives On

By James T. Richardson

…inwashing” was somehow involved. On June 14, the day that the subhead of a New York Times article asserted that, “Former Nxivm members testified they were brainwashed into being branded and assigned to have sex with him,” Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review published a short post titled, “There Is No Such Thing as ‘Brainwashing,’” in which he pointed out that the concept has “no scientific basis” and is generally regarded as “pseudoscience….

Does the Multifaith Model Work?

By Jas Chana

…of productive good. This rhetoric is at the heart of NYU’s pioneering academic minor in Multifaith and Spiritual Leadership. Juliana Rordorf, a student in the program, told me she was attracted by the minor’s practical focus. One of her projects involved writing a hypothetical letter to New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg around the time of 9/11, advising him how best to broach the topic of the controversial Park51 project with his constituents. He…

CNN’s Disastrous ‘Town Hall’ with Trump Put the Country at Risk

By Robert P. Jones

…ning. Its more direct take: “To call it a shitshow would be generous.” The New York Times concluded, “Trump’s Falsehoods and Bluster Overtake CNN Town Hall.” The Times also vividly described the raucous, hostile atmosphere CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins encountered: The audience’s regular interruptions on behalf of Mr. Trump were like a laugh track on a sitcom. It built momentum for him in the room — and onscreen for the television audience — and s…