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Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…the “FAA launches top secret investigation into incident.” To those who dismiss any sort of faith in angels, they belong to a category that also includes ghosts and UFO abductions, clairvoyance and Sasquatch. There are reasons for such dismissals, of course. Many pop cultural representations of angels borrow extensively from Victorian sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at reduced price; cheap wares for cheap faith. It would be an error, howev…

“You’ve Never Met a Muslim”

By Hussein Rashid

…g classrooms and rituals of community life, on the courage and goodness of New Yorkers, and on the horrific event that has shaped a generation of American Muslim life. Hussein Rashid_________ September 11, 2001. The day I became Muslim. That’s a lie. I am now a Muslim. I was not always. America made me Muslim. I was born into a Muslim family. Like all good children of immigrants, I rebelled. By the time I was 16, I was a firm Marxist, rejecting…

RDNews: Oct 20, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…xceptions for incest, rape or the life and health of the mother,” a recent New York Times editorial pointed out. The newspaper argued that the current measure was drafted “to make it nearly impossible to get an abortion, even during the first trimester of pregnancy. The measure is clearly unconstitutional under existing Supreme Court rulings, and that’s just the point. The underlying agenda is to provide a vehicle for challenging Roe v. Wade…” A r…

Rent-Free Religion in New York’s Public Schools

By Katherine Stewart

…isely, I started going to the churches—dozens of them—that were located in New York City’s public schools. I attended services all over Manhattan, in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. I watched as congregants prayed over pictures of children from diverse families that lined the school’s hallways. In public school classrooms, I learned about creationism and was taught that all children who do not believe in Jesus will go to hell, along with their pa…

Is Covid-19 Introducing a New Generation to Fears of ‘Jewish Contagion’?

By Amanda Furiasse

When news first broke of COVID-19’s presence in New York City, it centered on the city of New Rochelle and its Orthodox Jewish community as the source of the contagion. New York health officials announced that the state of New York would issue a containment zone one mile in every direction around an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in New Rochelle, called Young Israel of New Rochelle. A week after announcing this initial containment zone, the synagogue…

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

By Daniel Silliman

…between 1998 and 2005. These included three at historic sites: the Palmyra New York Temple, the Winter Quarters Nebraska Temple, and the Nauvoo Illinois Temple, whose re-construction Sorenson called “one of the great spiritual experiences of this life.”Sorenson died at 81. Robert K. Larson A Catholic priest convicted of sexually abusing altar boys, Robert K. Larson died at 84. Ordained in 1958, he was a priest in the Wichita, Kan., diocese for 30…

Leper Messiah: A Jesus Freak’s Search for the Meaning of Bowie—A Critical Novella

By Mark Dery

…ys to every telephone pole in town. Who raptured these guys out of mass anonymity, into the beatitude of celebrity? Wasn’t it us, the true believers who knew every line of every song by heart, singing along as Ziggy implored, on the razor’s edge between yearning and taunting, Gimme your hands ‘cause you’re wonderful Gimme your hands ‘cause you’re wonderful In his marvelous exercise in amateur hermeneutics, Ziggy ’72: A Catalogue of Lost Objects, B…

How Much Did Jesus Care About Sex?

By Peter Laarman

…ce of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without any reference to the context in which Bonhoeffer coined the term. The Gestapo didn’t hang Dietrich Bonhoeffer in April 1945 because he had taken a stand for sexual abstinence (which he hadn’t). Heinrich Himmler ordered Bonhoeffer to be hanged for treason: for i…

Episcopal Church Assault Data Reveals the Dark Side of Inclusive Christianity

By Charlotte Dalwood

…results of a survey, conducted in 2020, that quantifies the violence epidemic. Based on a similar survey conducted in 2017 amongst United Methodists in the United States, it contributes to the “truth telling” element of a planned truth-and-reconciliation process on gender and sexual abuse in Episcopal spaces. And the truth is horrifying. Of the more than 2400 responses collected, 475 (20%) are from cisgender LGB Episcopalians. Nearly 40% of these…

Power Up: Turn Off the Cell Phone

By Daniel Schultz

…plugged-in lifestyle doesn’t really get at the heart of the issue. I think the Amish, of all people, have it right. It’s not so much about what you as an individual are doing or not doing, as the effect technology has on the community: Why not make life easier and just put [a phone] in the house? “What would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a tel…