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Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…tive interpretation. Multiply ambiguous, it is a strange concoction of any number of animal and human forms, as well as a sphinx; itself a hybrid monster. Moreover, the Chicago Picasso intimates both the Egyptian and Greek sphinxes—an amalgam of cultural styles. An ambiguous, almost inscrutable object, it is an enigmatic icon and the icon of an enigma; its very presence confronts the populace with a riddle. The riddle is not simply what the Chicag…

Can the Catholic Church Survive Trump?

By Patricia Miller

…administration and the mandate. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2014. And starting around 2012, white Catholics broke for the GOP by historic margins. It’s also worth noting, as Michael Sean Winters has, that this occurred around the time the administrative staff of the bishops’ confer…

Turn On The News: This Isn’t a Split, It’s a Tiny Sliver of Conservatives Walking Out the Door — Introducing A New Media Criticism Column

By Daniel Schultz

…f understanding, speaking in ways that give good and fair arguments to the best of one’s ability and listening in ways that likewise seek to understand as much as possible. Journalists can rightly assume that their audience will participate in the listening part of that work. Nobody needs a willfully obtuse reader. But in trying to understand their sources, journalists often forget the first part of the equation. Which is to say, in a civil societ…

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

By Varun Soni

…ormal theological belief or conviction. However, they are prophetic in the way that the Indian Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan imagines prophets in the his classic work The Mysticism of Sound and Music, where he writes, “In fact, music excels religion, for music raises the soul of man even higher than the so-called external form of religion… That is why in ancient times, the greatest prophets were great musicians.” Members of the Grateful Dead in S…

Are You There God? It’s Us, Googling

By Michael Schulson

…ion in “Google searches for churches,” yet more evidence of the increasing number of “nones,” or that “searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere.” Other patterns are more jarring: “Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell,” he writes. Each month, on average, 422 people in th…

Indonesian Court Rejects Religious Conservatives’ Bid To Criminalize Gay Sex; More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ays after the House of Assembly voted 24-10 to take the right to marriage away from same-sex couples, the Senate voted 8-3 on Wednesday to send the bill to the governor for final approval. The legislation would reverse a May Supreme Court ruling that granted same-sex couples the right to marry and would instead codify domestic partnership rights. The Progressive Labor Party, which the New York Times describes as “backed by many traditionally conse…

First U.S. Visit of the Virgin Mary Confirmed in Wisconsin

By Lewis Wallace

…f the December 8 announcement, Tipps says, the shrine saw an unprecedented number of people. Visitors from as far away as New Mexico wandered onto the grounds, with several walking into the Tipps’ home assuming it was a visitor center. The shrine rented a port-a-john in order to have enough bathroom space, but it was quickly blown over by winter winds. Asked if she is happy about the developments, Tipps laughs. “We’re kind of being a little bit se…

Not a ‘Weenie-A** Lodge’: James Ray Trial Begins

By Johnny P. Flynn

…ss, and fifteen were reported to be suffering ill effects. In spite of the number of people who experienced difficulties during each of the eight fifteen-minute rounds, Ray contends he did not know that there were problems. In fact, Ray is accused of ignoring the pleas of those who wanted out; in one case an individual went out through the side of the sweat lodge to escape the heat. The prosecution played tapes of Ray before the sweat saying, “It’…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…is not a change in orientation; it is a different, religiously legitimated way of realizing it. A False Equivalence Finally, future reporting needs to include the social and political changes within which these reorientation stories are told. Many listeners rightly criticized NPR for creating the false impression of scientific and therapeutic equivalence between pro- and anti-conversion therapy camps. That impression was created in part because th…

Arizona Supreme Court Rules Against Disenfranchisement — But Privacy Issues Remain

By Steven Gardiner

…hey were not correctly registered. There is no evidence that a significant number of the Arizona residents caught up in this bureaucratic mix-up are non-citizens or otherwise ineligible to vote. Chief Justice Ann Timmer justified the decision: “We are unwilling, on these facts, to disenfranchise voters en masse from participating in state contests.” Yet the controversy surrounding the voters caught in the citizenship and identification mix-up does…