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Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…

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

By Sarah M. Pike

…een working feverishly to finish their projects but had put off purchasing tickets were left out in the cold. It was a different scene in 1997 when I first came to Burning Man and only waited briefly at the entrance as a “Greeter” cast a cursory glance at my car. But the Greeters’ enthusiastic reception remained the same. These Greeters, a dusty naked couple, asked me to get out of my car and embraced me, shouting “Welcome Home!” I had crossed the…

What a Turn-of-the-Century Anti-Abortion and Contraception Crusader Reveals About GOP Efforts to Ban Abortion Pills by Mail

By Steven K. Green

…items within their borders (as is already the case federally with lottery tickets). A Republican-controlled Congress could then impose a nationwide ban on the mailing of abortion pills or certain contraceptives. (Republican-controlled state legislatures have already demonstrated a willingness to enact questionable legislation for nothing more than its intimidation factor.) Which brings us back to Anthony Comstock. In 1878, the Supreme Court uphel…

Invited by Allah

By Amina Wadud

…ccurred to me it would be a very easy to make hajj from there. I bought an airline ticket and was in contact with the family of one of my graduate school friends. They would pick me up from the airport and host me during my stay and the days of ritual. Nice plan. So I went to the embassy to get the visa and was denied because (as an American) I needed proof that I was Muslim. How do I prove I have been a practicing Muslim for a decade? I went to t…

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

By Austin Dacey

…ual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as the video monitors snapped to the image of an engorged sun bursting from be…

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

By Marion Grau

…alse—swept through the terminals, sending passengers, law-enforcement, and airline workers scrambling for cover and eventually onto the tarmac. The responding authorities found neither shooters nor evidence of any shots fired. The most likely explanation offered for the panic was that the cheering of Olympics fans for Usain Bolt’s performance in the 100 meters sounded like gunfire. In an episode titled “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” from…

Gingrich Downplays Adelson Money, Stokes Fear of “Second Holocaust” at Florida Church

By Sarah Posner

…ughter Bella was hospitalized.) Organizers said they had distributed 1,800 tickets, and the pews in the church were nearly full, with several hundred, if not nearly a thousand people in attendance. Gingrich was the only candidate to appear; Staver, the “forum’s” moderator took pains to point out that they had invited the other candidates. Santorum and Ron Paul had commitments outside of Florida. Mitt Romney, the candidate Staver and other leaders…

Feared Taliban Leader Killed, But Military Strategy is Not the Answer in Afghanistan

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…estroy. Like the North Vietnamese, many Afghan activists—and an increasing number of Pakistanis—are motivated to fight against the American presence because of their love of freedom. They see the US military, like the Soviet forces before them, as a foreign occupying power. The Taliban, as draconian as they may be, are seen as enemies of the enemy: us. It is the US military presence, paradoxically, that is uniting the Taliban and marshaling wide p…

Mao, Meet Confucius: China’s Religious Revolution

By Kwok Pui-lan

…Protestant seminary. Religion was no longer a taboo subject. Students at a Shanghai university, mostly non-Christian, saw the poster about my lecture and came to listen out of curiosity. These kinds of exchanges would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. Confucius Faces Mao In another marker of the new, more pluralistic religious landscape in China, President Hu Jintao will visit a Confucius Institute in Chicago on January 21, 2011, after his…

#NamaSlay, Or How Black Women Are Using Trap Yoga as a Mode of Spiritual Resistance

By Anita Little

…ld teaching trap yoga ever since, with her work taking her everywhere from Shanghai to Rio de Janeiro. She’s now professionally known as Yoga Bae. To complement her trap yoga classes, she created “ratchet affirmations,” self-assertions that use language typically associated with the hood to encourage one to say no to the negative elements in ones life and yes to joy. “The words we use are vulgar and disrespectful like the music we listen to, but t…