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

By Marion Grau

…ion, with no clear instructions, we stood there, left to ourselves. In the days after the event, I watched a YouTube video which showed airport police heavily armed in riot gear coming into what looks like JFK’s Terminal 8 to do a sweep. I was reminded of the insistence, by Black Lives Matter activists, that effective policing has to be more than police in riot gear rushing in with big guns—that it’s about being present, building trust, soothing p…

More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e group did not get a private meeting with Pope Francis, but was given VIP tickets to the pope’s weekly audience in St. Peter’s square. Religion News Service reports that several bishops, including “San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone – point man or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ battle against gay marriage – had written a letter to the Vatican on their behalf.” A group of LGBT Catholics from London who met up with the New Ways…

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

By Sarah M. Pike

…large state university told me that Burning Man is her only “religious holiday.” For true believers, mundane life pales in comparison to this annual Labor Day gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Often tagged as a countercultural festival, it is not really that at all. Burners are the culture, and among its most privileged members, with money and time to spend. Many of them hold down regular jobs in small businesses or corporate America: they…

Is Joel Osteen, Success Mag Cover Boy, Really “God’s Best”?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…n selfish, slow to help the poor and needy around me, hesitant to give from my own abundance. If Joel Osteen is honest, he would see that while he is indeed living man’s best—and is a role model for worldly success—his ministry is woefully lacking when measured against “God’s best.”…

2023 CPAC Lived Down to Expectations, But Don’t Buy the Narrative: The GOP is Not as Divided as You Might Think

By Annika Brockschmidt

…g the trend of traditional conservatives or libertarians—what amounts to today’s centrists—identifying as “classical liberals.” No one who appeared there has even the slightest chances of a political career or even comeback in today’s GOP. And while Pence, Tim Scott and DeSantis—who’ve all spoken at CPAC in previous years—were indeed guests at an event hosted by the anti-tax advocacy group Club for Growth, an influential player in Republican polit…

Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

By Daniel Silliman

…1990s. Hill preached at the Brownsville Assembly of God church on Father’s Day 1995, and the church experienced “an outpouring of the Holy Spirit”that believers said sounded like a mighty wind. An estimated 2.5 million attended the revival by 1998. Jamie Coots A third-generation signs-following pentecostal preacher who handled venomous snakes in worship, Jamie Coots was bitten and died refusing medical treatment. He was 42. Coots was pastor of a s…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…esearch in the Apostolate, only one-quarter of Catholics attend mass every week (CARA has some of the best, most rigorous tracking of mass attendance; other surveys find higher percentages using more generous methodologies.) The number of priests and nuns has declined precipitously; from 58,000 to 38,000 for priests and from 125,000 to 50,000 for nuns. Despite a significantly larger population, there are 1,300 fewer parishes, with an average of ju…

Invited by Allah

By Amina Wadud

…business days. I figured: if they got my visa into the embassy on the same day it arrived, at least ten days were up. Anyway I was too nervous NOT to make contact before the weekend, because, well, I was just nervous, okay? So when I finally got up the nerve to call the tour agency about my visa process, the woman said, “you got the visa, but since your passport was submitted late, we don’t have it back yet, but you got the visa.” !!!! I know she…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…and the message, but actually hungry for both. When I spoke to Bell on the phone a couple weeks after the event in Durham, he told me, In some ways what I do is basic pastoring. It’s, you give people an idea, you let them respond to it, you give them another idea….it’s basic spiritual direction. Like the itinerant rabbi, the guru—not to say that I’m a guru—but there’s a long tradition [of that kind of work]. But so many people right now are rethin…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…In the midst of their busy schedules, the pastors met with me the first Monday after the weekend to discuss my concern that paying for the teens to watch this movie crossed the line from teaching good Christian behavior to political advocacy. Both were friendly, and our meeting wasn’t confrontational, but several times during our conversation, I felt like I was flashing back to another lifetime, when I shared the same fundamentalist worldview as t…