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LDS Church Launches New Website Calling for Greater Openness and Understanding on LGBT Issues

By Joanna Brooks

When he visited mormonsandgays.org shortly after its official launch yesterday morning, Jayce Cox cried. There at the new LDS Church-owned website, Cox, a gay Mormon man with six generations of family history in the LDS faith, saw video messages from top-ranking Church leaders and rank-and-file gay Mormons calling explicitly for greater understanding, openness, and dialogue around LGBT issues and an end to the rejection of gay family members, con…

Clarion Fund Claims Times Square Bombing Attempt Proof of “Coordinated Jihad Against Western Values”

By Sarah Posner

…rious threat — that of Islamism — and makes it into a cartoon.” At the web site Jews On First, which follows the religious right, a number of analysts contributed to Rebutting Obsession, which as the name suggests, cuts through the film’s ahistorical, conspiratorial, and propagandistic claims. Writing around the same time in the London Review of Books, Adam Shatz described the Clarion Fund as: a front for neoconservative and Israeli pressure group…

Dreaming Cyborg Dreams: Virtual Identity and Religious Experience

By Rachel Wagner

…ended the lives of more than 70 people. According to the Eddo Stern’s Web site, gamers “enter the mind and form of a resurrected David Koresh,” and enter the game’s network “as a Koresh [who] must defend the Branch Davidian compound against internal intrigue, skeptical civilians, rival Koresh, and the inexorable advance of government agents” [my italics]. Within the plastic mask, players are “bombarded with a soundstream of government ‘psy-ops,’…

Five Social Media Trends that are Reshaping Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…into face-to-face relationships. If the folks at Nielsen are correct, smartphones will continue to overtake, uh, dumb phones, making app-based connection and information-sharing a continuing growth area. Religiously-themed apps are certain to be an important part of that, but unless they grasp the digital trinity of social engagement, spiritual meaning, and incarnational potential that makes such apps truly worthwhile for believers and seekers. Th…

Who Is “Sam Bacile?”

By Sarah Posner

…d that the film was intended to be a provocative political statement assailing the religion. He denied being Sam Bacile, the pseudonym for the video’s purportedly Israeli Jewish writer and director, but AP said the cellphone number it called for a telephone interview with Bacile on Tuesday matched Nakoula’s address. —- For more RD coverage of the events in Libya see “Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuses,” by Haroon Moghul — ed….

South Asian Religious Leaders Challenged to Take on Stigma and Discrimination: Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…the government, which it likens to Nazis and Communists. Last week British official released figures on the number of same-sex couples who got married between March 29 – the first day marriage was legally available in England and Wales, and June 30. Of the 1,409 marriages, 56 percent were to female couples. According to Gay Star News, about 120,000 people are in civil partnerships, which they will be able to convert to marriages beginning in Decem…

How to Choose a Tour Company for Your Hajj

By Amina Wadud

…nts than their quota allows. Most Muslim countries have a quota; a limited number of hajjis permitted from that country in any one year. This number is set by hajj authorities in Saudi Arabia, because, in all fairness, there has to be a cap on how many Muslims converge on the place. Right now, it stands at around 3 million! Countries with large populations of Muslims have many more applicants than their allotted number of pilgrims. This means you…

Eclipseville, USA: The Birthplace of ‘Little Green Men’ Proudly Hosts The Point of Greatest Eclipse

By Matthew Bowman

…of their pilots. Reflecting the optimism of the early nuclear age, a good number of these experiences portrayed these extraterrestrials as comical, or even friendly. A journalist named Frank Scully wrote a book claiming that aliens dressed in “the style of 1890” had been recovered from a saucer crash in the Mojave Desert in 1949. The Californian George Adamski claimed that in November 1952 a cigar-shaped spacecraft landed near his campsite in sou…

Eid on 9/11 Anniversary?

By Haroon Moghul

…town there was too much smoke to go any further. People rushing in the opposite direction, coming from out of the smoke, screamed—maybe at me—where are you going? At a loss for what to do, I thought I should go to the Muslim prayer room on campus, where students, anxious and afraid, might gather for help. The subways were closed, and cell phone service had gone out. I had no other idea how to find my friends, no idea where else to go. At the very…

Refusing the Monsters on Maple Street: A First-Person Commentary from the Mass Hysteria at JFK

By Marion Grau

…I shared what I learned with those standing around me or who didn’t have a phone, compared notes with others about what they knew, and tried to calm some who were scared and close to panic. As far as I could tell, the TSA personnel and other security officials seemed know about as much as the passengers about what was happening—all around me, I sensed a complete failure of nerve. A black woman wearing a security vest crouched outside on the tarmac…