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Everything You Think You Know About the Dark Ages is Wrong

By Nancy Marie Brown

…lerk to get back my ID card and the ultimate prize: a plastic block with a number on it. I was then permitted to sit in a chair—but not look at any manuscripts, yet. Juste sat down beside me. “What you will see here,” he whispered, “is the earliest Latin manuscript to contain Arabic words. The earliest proof of the transmission of Arabic science to the West. Now I will order the manuscript.” He filled out a form and took it to another desk. Te…

“Tell Me What You Believe About Ferguson, and I’ll Tell You What You Believe About God”: A Missouri Pilgrimage

By Anita Little

…akes the bus because he got tired of the random stops and numerous traffic tickets he would get each month due to racial profiling. At 30 years old, he says he has been stopped or arrested for unjust cause more than 150 times. “If you’re a person of color in Missouri, it’s just part of the normal experience. You go five miles over the speed limit, you sit in jail for two weeks.” Masri, whose family is Palestinian and who spent some time living in…

NPR “Ex-Gay” Report Neither “Fair” Nor “Balanced”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…people for “therapies” that can destroy them psychologically, while buying tickets to Toscano’s shows might result in some good belly laughs, but no pressure to convert. What makes this story so shameful, though, is how the true message is completely glossed over in the pursuit of finding out who is “right” and who is “wrong.” Both Wyler and Toscano are Christian men who were given the message early on in their lives that being gay or lesbian was…

I Miss Tina Fey

By Julie Ingersoll

…half. There were still probably 80 empty seats, and it was clear that some number of attendees had free tickets. The largest financial supporter of the event was a local news/talk radio station and its representatives were the only media allowed in. As I arrived with my Religion Dispatches press badge they stopped me before I even got to the door. I chatted with an AP reporter and he said AP had been trying for weeks to gain media access—but that…

The Sacred and the Dead: Three Ways to American Beauty

By Aaron K. Kerr

…Candyman’s in town” This is the grateful seduction, sometimes for good, many times for ill, but real any way you slice it. Two more times for the Dead to, in the words of bassist Phil Lesh, “suck the last dance right out of you…” How much are those tickets to the very last gigs at Soldier Field this weekend going for? For real? You got to be kidding me! I could feed a family for a month for that price. But one can’t put a price on American Beauty…

Answers in Genesis Seeks Tax Breaks for New Theme Park

By Lauri Lebo

…evelopers of approved projects the sales tax paid by visitors on admission tickets, food, gift sales and lodging costs. Developers have 10 years to reach the 25 percent threshold. Rob Boston, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says there are concerns over the project, but it’s too early to tell whether the proposed business incentives would be unconstitutional in that it would involve excessive entanglement with r…

Community Organizing and Symbolic Electioneering

By Laura R. Olson

…n media events. Most major decisions about the composition of presidential tickets — and even policy platforms — are made well before the speaker hits the rostrum. The delegates serve a largely symbolic role, and the speakers’ real audience is the electorate at large, following (or so both political parties hope) convention coverage at home on television and the Internet. Thus, the rhetoric that emerges from presidential nominating conventions sho…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…s I watched talented African American actors hamming up “African-ness” for cheap laughs. It brought to mind the long, shameful history of Americans—black and white—performing blackness (often in blackface) on stage for white audiences. The Book of Mormon wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of The Lion King and its African stereotypes by substituting more authentic stereotypes. It wants to be transgressive and conventional, blasphemous…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…