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

By Austin Dacey

…ed, you may be relieved to know. Perhaps you would agree that in the final analysis, such things are of no concern. No, Mr. Smisek, this message is not the grievance of a disgruntled customer. It is a witness to an abomination. It is a plea for spiritual 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 th…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…ind priests willing to perform marriage rites in Tampere, Helsinki and Vantaa, at least. But in Kotka, southeast Finland, the local diocese has issued a ruling banning even prayers on church premises for same-sex couples who have exchanged wedding vows. The ban extends to prayer sessions held by priests for gay couples who have tied the knot in civil ceremonies. Kotka clerics also decided to discontinue the practice of reading wedding announcement…

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

By Daniel Silliman

…ivil rights activists. He helped Martin Luther King, Jr. make the argument against Vietnam, drafting King’s “Beyond Vietnam”speech in 1967, broadening the concern of the movement and alienating some moderate civil rights supporters. Author of numerous works on American-American religious history, including There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America and Martin Luther King: An Inconvenient Hero, Harding taught at Illiff School of Th…

The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

By Kaya Oakes

…d girls who swayed through those parking lots asking for change, and the “mamas” and “old ladies” minding the camp stove while 60-something-year-old Deadhead guys hit on my teenage friends by offering them tickets to shows. Deadheads were anathema to my chosen subculture of socially conscious punks. East Bay punks were aggro and in your face about social justice, feminism, human rights; Deadheads, in our eyes, were too stoned and obsessed with the…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…he United Arab Emirates, or UAE, is the only functioning federation in the Arab world, composed of six states that joined together in 1971 and a seventh that decided to come along a year later. The two primary emirates are Abu Dhabi, the capital and wealthiest of the seven, whose territory is 87% of the whole country’s, and Dubai. Dubai is the second of the two, but easily the more famous. In the past fifteen years, the city has grown from a small…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…on a San Francisco beach in 1986 and was moved to an obscure corner of Nevada called the Black Rock Desert in 1990, where it eventually grew into an internationally renowned event that draws close to 50,000 participants annually. For one week in late August and early September, an elaborate civic infrastructure called “Black Rock City” is constructed, featuring a carefully laid out grid of streets in which participants set up hundreds of differe…

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

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…of his evangelical base by 2011, when he published Love Wins, an argument against the existence of Hell. Cast out of the evangelical mainstream, Bell traded the pulpit for the stage. He went on a Love Wins book tour, made the cover of Time, and left Michigan for California to develop a television show. After that project fell through Bell developed a talk show for Oprah’s OWN network, and he recently joined her on the eight-city “The Life You Wan…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…y it, so I will: a lot of religion polling is bullshit. This isn’t just an academic squabble. Polling firms like Pew and Gallup offer the principal lens through which journalists, pundits, religious leaders, and politicians observe the spiritual state of the union. Polls and surveys shape debates about policy and public morality. They help define key groups—evangelicals, for example, or the nones—that crop up again and again in the media. Inventin…

The Religious Implications of Nudity

By Steve A. Wiggins

A TSA pat-down—security never felt so good! Or so bad. “But it’s against my religion,” I explain to the stern-looking officer who is directing me to the full-body scanner with a gaze that would stop Superman. I feel as if I have been profiled. A man traveling alone, looking like he has nothing to lose (people tell me I should smile more). It is a lazy weekday morning in the Raleigh-Durham Airport and I am returning from a business trip I didn’t r…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…. And yet I was told that not one of us did or said anything to fight back against the ugliness and barbarity of indiscriminate violence. Too many people—not just dentists on Virgin Airlines—make statements like, “Muslims don’t do enough to reject terrorism.” It’s probable many of them have never met Muslims. If they tried, they might be surprised. In fact, the reaction to my essay—you’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I cou…