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Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…defended, and derided through the ages. Here begins the downturn of their GPA. On the first day of class I provide my students with a ten-page list of brief definitions of religion assembled by my hardworking colleague Darren Middleton. The nearly 100 definitions on the list range from those given by religious leaders like the Dalai Lama and Lao-Tzu, Christian thinkers from C.S. Lewis to Paul Tillich, critics of religion like Sigmund Freud and Kar…

Hajj Journal: Door Number 89: The Door with No Name

By Amina Wadud

…d inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out af…

How Does an Atheist Come to Believe in God?: An Interview with Jacob Needleman

By Lisa Webster

…ok. I read it. I realized there is something here after all. So that was a parallel. My personal inner work was parallel with my academic work in a way. Although I never made the connection between God and what I had studied with the Gurdjieff teaching. It was not a religion, it was something else. It wasn’t called a religion, wasn’t meant to be equated with religion. And there were reasons for that. I think Gurdjieff felt that the language of rel…

Gay Marriage Opponents Running on Empty

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…I have hand-counted 29 non-NOM staffers attending the rally—about the same number that have attended every other event on this tour.” They were outnumbered by those who came in support of marriage equality. … about 95 marriage equality supporters marched in to the event to counter-protest NOM on a sidewalk across from the event. Impressive. Once again, NOM has been embarrassed on this tour, drawing significantly fewer supporters to their event tha…

Cloverfield: Sin & Redemption, with Monsters

By Gabriel Mckee

…the audience, of course, loves it. The focus of Gamera 3 is on the human impact of this sort of tragedy, and Cloverfield, shot in shaky, first-person video, is all about human impact. But what is the sin that the monster is punishment for? In short, it’s self-absorption: the characters in this film search for cell phone chargers while the world falls down around them. In one key scene (that appears in the trailer), the monster hurls the head of th…

My Lowest Point

By Amina Wadud

…ace. We’d made plans to meet up in case we got separated and had exchanged phone numbers. In the middle of the tawaf, the call to prayer came. The guards stopped the tawaf. Some people complied and started to form lines. I found a spot between two women, each with their husbands, and sat down on the line. This seemed an ideal spot until a woman in black niqab squeezed in on my left just as we started the prayer. Okay then. Before we had completed…

The Real Story Behind Rick Perry’s Secret Meetings with Pastors

By Sarah Posner

…tor of Perry’s prayer rally scheduled for August 6. His group did not just participate in a single phone call, as Amy Sullivan reported at TIME, but gathered for a two-day meeting June 21-22, which was a follow-up to a meeting Robison convened last September. The same day that Robison wrote in a blog post that “Christians must respond to the invitation issued by the prophet Joel to ‘return to God’,” Perry announced his rally, saying, “Some problem…

Conservative Rep Grills Oklahoma Personhood Sponsors

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…. (Disclosure: I live in Oklahoma and have been involved, in a volunteer capacity, in some of the efforts to defeat this legislation.) Personhood USA appears to have learned one lesson from its recent loss in Mississippi: ballot initiatives carry risks, and payoffs, that bills in the legislature don’t. In Oklahoma, therefore, they’re trying for both a bill and, later, a ballot initiative. (Surprisingly, they don’t seem to have considered that it m…

Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

By Kent L. Brintnall

…in mind. I can name the people who were my imagined audience. I have their numbers in my cell phone. There are, of course, lots of other people I would invite to eavesdrop on this solipsistic soliloquy. I’d like Bataille scholars to read the book. I’d like people who’ve never heard of Bataille to read the book. I’d like feminist and queer theologians—and those scholars who study queer theory—to read it. And if a serious scholar of Bacon’s or Mappl…

Vatican Considers ‘Disordered’ Language; HBO Doc on LGBT Persecution in Russia; Nigerian Bishop Shifts on Anti-Gay Law; Arson at ‘Open Mosque’ in South Africa; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…n same – sex relationships find that they can practice their faith in full participation in local parishes – until knowledge that they have formalized those relationships in marriage leads to exclusion from ministry, dismissal from employment, or other forms of discrimination. Also at the Wednesday press conference, in the words of the Commonweal blog, Kaigama “complained about Western attempts to influence African values—especially the flooding o…