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

By Sarah M. Pike

…ge students, massage therapists and social workers, lawyers and emergency room physicians. They staff what Burners have dubbed “the default world” and keep it running, even though they come to the desert to escape it. Desert Pilgrimage The main road to the Black Rock Desert is a seemingly endless two-lane highway running north from Interstate 80 just east of Reno and through the Pyramid Lake Reservation. Pilgrims to Burning Man must navigate horde…

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

By Austin Dacey

…allowed halls of Western art music, smothered under a featureless musical goo and carried off to further mutilations I will not relate here. Mr. Smisek, I am not a religious person. If I can be said to adhere to any confession, it is that primordial, preliterate one that has sprung forth everywhere ever since we beings were human: the covenant of sound. You and your associates have desecrated a work of transcendent beauty and blasphemed Music. I d…

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

By Marion Grau

…international airports seized up as panicked reports of “multiple active shooters”—later discredited as false—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 i…

Invited by Allah

By Amina Wadud

…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 the famous al-Azhar university and secured a shahadah document in French, Ar…

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

By Sarah Posner

…terer-turned Catholic whose campaign is underwritten by a Jewish casino tycoon, walked into a Baptist church where the audience had been primed with speeches about how “God intended” marriage to be “between one man and one woman” and how their state was on the verge of being taken over by the “vice” of gambling. But it wasn’t a joke, it was a Newt Gingrich campaign appearance at a Presidential Forum, hosted by the conservative Christian legal grou…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…in notices issued by the local church. This parish will only open church doors to heterosexual couples. “God’s will is clear and perfect. From the perspective of teachings on marriage, it is more coherent to separate customers of marriage ceremonies and blessings into their own spaces. Priests who offer prayers can do so with couples in other venues,” said Ville Mielonen, a member of the Kotka-Kymi parish council that tabled the proposal, which w…

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

By Daniel Silliman

…and Martin Luther King: An Inconvenient Hero, Harding taught at Illiff School of Theology in Denver, Colo. for more than 20 years. Nelson Bunker Hunt A Texas billionaire remembered mostly for his business exploits, Nelson Bunker Hunt bankrolled the religious right. He underwrote many Campus Crusade’s projects, including the 1967 “Berkley Blitz,”the $6 million Jesus film in 1979, and a $30 million campaign to evangelize the world by 1980. He gave…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…e said. “I want to be the role model I didn’t have. You see somebody that looks like you and you say, maybe I can be a part of this.” Finland: ‘Intense’ debate over marriage equality in Lutheran Church The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland is “the only Nordic national church which doesn’t celebrate same-sex marriage,” reports Evangelical Focus. Lutheran churches in Sweden, Iceland, Denmark and Norway celebrate same-sex marriages. Marriage equ…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…in 1996, I’ve wanted to write about it. I was in my early years of grad school at the time and it didn’t take long to see that I’d stumbled into an extraordinary cultural petri dish in which people were consciously playing with art, symbol, and ritual in order to explore, expand, and reinvent the boundaries of late-modern culture. Burning Man started as an impromptu gathering among a handful of friends on a San Francisco beach in 1986 and was mov…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…rch-conservative Dinesh D’Souza’s election-year documentary (based on his book The Roots of Obama’s Rage) with my 19-year-old daughter, Chassé. As someone who is now a secular progressive single mom of seven kids, five of whom live at home, I wouldn’t normally choose to spend our family’s perpetually-insufficient income to see this Obama-bashing movie, let alone take along one of my kids. But we went because I wanted to see the movie that our form…