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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…

An Open Letter to CEO Jeff Smisek On United Airlines’ Blasphemous Safety Video

By Austin Dacey

…ng of something even more hideous. The melody disappeared entirely to make way for the announcer’s voiceover—“Please make sure your phone and all electronics are switched off and stowed”—as a single chord hovered to a simple four-beat pulse in the fashion of light pop radio. Gone were the jaunty, urbane syncopations that will forever mark the arrival of the jazz idiom—and with it the bluesy sinews of the American soul—to the hallowed halls of West…

“As Orthodox As They Come”: A Backstage Conversation With Rob Bell

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…, as opposed to labels like New Age, or Spiritual But Not Religious? I’m always and deeply compelled by Jesus. I’ve always loved the idea of an open tomb, and a movement of people who insist that the world is made better not through coercive military violence but through sacrificial love. I love that these first Christians took on Roman military propaganda—“Caesar is lord, there is no other name under heaven by which people could be saved than tha…

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

By Daniel Silliman

…athist ways”and accept immortality into their DNA. John-Roger Hinkins The “way-shower”of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA), John-Roger Hinkins died at 80. Raised Mormon, Hinkins was a high school teacher in Southern California when he discovered “soul consciousness.”He founded MSIA—pronounced “messiah”—in 1971, teaching one could achieve a totally positive state of being with the help of the Mystical Traveler Consciousness he embodi…

‘Anti-Romeo’ Vigilante Squads Target Men Suspected Of Being Gay; More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…lectorate than it is with straight voters. LePen’s Party, which includes a number of openly gay officials, still pledges to roll back the marriage equality law in favor of civil unions. As AP notes, LePen is not the only nationalist leader who uses fear of radical Islamist violence to attract LGBT support: In the Netherlands, Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders said that his party, which is hostile to Muslims and wants to halt immigration, shou…

The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

By Kaya Oakes

…e, and I’d hear the tail end of a Dead set drifting down from the Greek, always, always, always with the same finale: “Sugar Magnolia.” My friends and I would start roaring with laughter at that “doo doo-doo” chorus, occasionally passing a pedestrian in tie dye or flowy skirts who couldn’t get a ticket, and we’d keep laughing as that person started his or her ridiculous spinning dance in middle of the street. That was their ritual, these Deadheads…

The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…say that, “We are the chosen people,” or “The Pope is infallible,” or “Our way is the only way,” or “the Bible is inerrant.” You have to make a claim that locks security up tightly. It doesn’t work, but it’s popular. There will always be fundamentalist churches. They will always promise things they can’t deliver and people will leave when a tragedy comes. Fundamentalist churches don’t tend to last past the charismatic pastor that got them started….

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…y airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us out to be (our earliest heroes include Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a…

How to Choose a Tour Company for Your Hajj

By Amina Wadud

…omplete. It all feels rather last-minute to me. But then, maybe that’s the way it goes. No, if I had my way I would call this entry: how not to choose a tour company. Really. The choice of the company I am working this out with is the result of one of those eeny-meeny-miny-mo Internet searches. It’s a business, after all, this: getting people to and from hajj. A simple Google search produces lots of choices. But then, how does one decide? Let’s st…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…f the problem comes when information that’s useful in a limited, qualified way gets spun into generalization and speculation in the media. At the same time, polling firms do a lot to manufacture the appearance of certainty. In particular, they choose to report statistics as single numbers (for example, Pew recently found that 24% of Jehovah’s Witnesses describe themselves as born-again) rather than as margin-of-error ranges, normalized around a me…