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The Contested Religious Powers of Baseball on Display in Cuba

By Sean O'Neil

…ion, can provide pluralistic spaces of resiliency in the face of terror. Many claim baseball did that after 9/11. Obama is a believer in that legacy. But the power of sports to produce heightened emotional states of unity, which scholars call “collective effervescence,” can also give it a shared power with religion to occlude injustice in this world, to bury it in cheap, playful sentiment. Sports, like religion, and like the American Dream, will t…

Mormon Women Knock at the Door, Are Turned Away

By Holly Welker

…lling itself Ordain Women, the group had already requested and been denied tickets to Saturday evening’s male-only priesthood session. Nonetheless the women and their allies walked to the Tabernacle on Temple Square to wait in the stand-by line for last-minute tickets. Instead they were met by church spokesperson Ruth Todd, who said, “This is no surprise to you, that we won’t be able to offer you a ticket or a place.” Then, as men and boys strode…

Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

By Andrew Aghapour

…o is not? Who plays what role? What causal contribution do they make? Did anybody make a decision, did subgroups make a decision, did they just sort of all play their little parts and the aggregation of all these individual parts make up the institution, the collective behavior? None of this we normally know about an institution, and even if they haven’t done anything bad yet, just watching them you’d wonder why exactly and who exactly does what….

Pope Praises ‘Complementarity’ & Resists Gay Ambassador; Irish Religious Leaders Spar Over Marriage; Colombian Atty Gen Cites ‘Bogus’ Study Opposing Adoption; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…cause some studies support this finding doesn’t mean it’s true. In fact, many, many more studies reached opposite conclusions. “Research … has developed a scholarly consensus that shows that children raised by same-sex couples are at no important disadvantage,” wrote Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld in an email. “There is a noisy fringe of academics who claim that children raised by same-sex couples are in disastrous peril,” a vie…

Paranormal Vodka, Exorcists and a Demonic Doll: Welcome to Paracon, Based on the Work of the Demon-Hunters Who Inspired the ‘Conjuring’ Series

By Eric Harrelson and Joseph P. Laycock

…n-goers want not only to see Annabelle, but to be seen by her. Organizer Tony Spera, seems unbothered by any potential demonic hazard that displaying Annabelle may have created. In fact, Spera facilitates possibly the strangest item for sale on the convention floor: Harridan Vodka Paranormal Reserve—a bottle of vodka that’s been aged next to the Annabelle doll in the Warren’s Occult Museum. A limited run of 666 (of course) bottles have been produc…

Spiritual Unplugging, Or What to Do When There is Wifi at the Ashram

By Matt Hamilton

…yself as I sat in morning meditation, relishing the slow pace, the lack of phone, and the birds, chirping in the canyon surrounding the ashram. After about an hour of silence, the spiritual director Surrendra read a passage aloud from the legendary 20th century yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda. “Yours is a glorious destiny. You are a child of the Infinite!” Surrendra said. “Why delay? Why waste time on countless detours? Go straight to Him.” Delays and…

Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…y from Victorian sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at reduced price; cheap wares for cheap faith. It would be an error, however, to fully dismiss pop culture angels. Despite the fact that representations of angels in film and television, comics and music, paperback novels and posters, are filtered through market concerns, such pop culture can still speak to human meaning—and because of that they merit our attention. Besides, the bulk of art…

How Much Did Jesus Care About Sex?

By Peter Laarman

…ce of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without any reference to the context in which Bonhoeffer coined the term. The Gestapo didn’t hang Dietrich Bonhoeffer in April 1945 because he had taken a stand for sexual abstinence (which he hadn’t). Heinrich Himmler ordered Bonhoeffer to be hanged for treason: for i…

Beyond Alarmism and Denial in the Dominionism Debate

By Anthea Butler

…church, they’re marinating, so to speak, in the the various teachings of a number of people. I’ve covered many an event where I’ve been waiting in line to get in, and the inevitable conversation with the people around you goes something like this: they ask first where you go to church, and second which teachers you admire, and then you get into a long conversation about the relative virtues of all of them. A really good example of how all these te…

Episcopal Church Assault Data Reveals the Dark Side of Inclusive Christianity

By Charlotte Dalwood

…front for LGB-identified Episcopalians.) It would be difficult to come to any conclusion other than that the culture of The Episcopal Church is one in which “problem” victims who speak out are either ignored or made to go away. It’s a wonder any abuser survivors responded to the denomination’s survey at all. The dark side of inclusive Christianity The data the survey nonetheless yielded would be sobering in any context. But it’s a particularly str…