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

By Sarah M. Pike

…kepocalypse”: for the first time ever, the event sold out. Scalpers hawked tickets for hundreds of dollars over their purchase price and artists who had been 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 re…

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

By Marion Grau

…etween the benches. I waited there until an official-looking man in plain clothes told us to empty the terminal. People began running in panic, dropping their belongings as they ran. We went down a staircase and waited outside for a while, before we got herded to the other side of the terminal where many were already gathered. Clueless as to the situation, with no clear instructions, we stood there, left to ourselves. In the days after the event,…

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…

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…

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

By Sarah Posner

…eadership Conference; Personhood USA, the national organization pushing ballot measures declaring fertilized eggs persons; and Champion the Vote, the get-out-the-vote project of United in Purpose, the non-profit organization funded by Silicon Valley venture capitalists which, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, “is using sophisticated data-mining techniques to compile a database of every unregistered born-again and evangelical Christia…

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

By Daniel Silliman

…er the years and was celebrated by the religious right. “The Bible tells a lot about how to run a business if we just read it and apply it,”Cathy said. He died at 94. David Eugene Sorenson An elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, David E. Sorenson was executive director of temple building at a time when the church built more temples than ever before. Under the direction of Gordon B. Hinkley, who authorized a smaller, less expen…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…y artist who lives in a hipster district of Paris and plans to cast his ballot for Le Pen. While nobody knows how far Le Pen’s supporters will carry her in the April 23-May 7 vote, several years of polls have shown the National Front is now more popular with the LGBT voters who make up 6.5 percent of the French electorate than it is with straight voters. LePen’s Party, which includes a number of openly gay officials, still pledges to roll back the…

A Peek Inside the ‘Onion’ of Scientology

By Kristin Rawls

…an any other white guy in the 1950s. He was a man of his time. There was a lot of discrimination in our country and a lot of prejudice against Jews. But there were a lot of Jewish people among the early Scientologists, and they have always had a lot of Jewish members. So, he was never overtly hostile toward Jews, at least not that I am aware [of]. But psychiatrists and psychologists are a stand-in for anything evil, and they are viewed in much th…

Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…ed young men, one with a math book open on his lap, another intent on his iPhone. There are a lot of white people in this room; I scan for diversity and find a few people of color, but the audience is only consistently stratified by age. There are elderly atheists, but also lots of middle-aged and hipster young-twenties atheists. I see both aging hippies still wearing tie-dye and elegant white-haired people who would fit into any Episcopal congreg…

Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…