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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

…titution (so, it too could be revoked by the conservative justices). But generally, one state cannot prevent its citizens from traveling to another state to receive benefits and services there. As for mailing abortion pills (or contraceptives, for that matter), mail delivery is under the control of the federal government, not the states (thus, the U.S. Mail). State officials have no inherent authority to inspect mail or its contents. The purchasin…

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

By Sarah M. Pike

…ce are said to be different in Black Rock City. No one was talking on cell phones, clocks were largely invisible, and the city’s layout reoriented participants with its semi-circular streets running from A to L. This year the letters marked various rites of passage: Anniversary, Birthday, Coming Out, Divorce, Engagement, Funeral, Graduation, Hajj, Initiation, Journey, Kindergarten, and Liminal. Bisecting the rites of passage streets were cross str…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…e. Masons wear ceremonial aprons decked with alchemical symbols and lay cornerstones on dates chosen for their astrological auspiciousness. In the eighteenth century, Freemasonry overlapped heavily with “Mesmerism,” the secretive movement that claimed to harness the power of humans’ “animal magnetism.” Of course, many prominent Masons in that period were scientists, including chemists, astronomers, and physicists; nevertheless, they saw what we wo…

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

By Marion Grau

…I shared what I learned with those standing around me or who didn’t have a phone, compared notes with others about what they knew, and tried to calm some who were scared and close to panic. As far as I could tell, the TSA personnel and other security officials seemed know about as much as the passengers about what was happening—all around me, I sensed a complete failure of nerve. A black woman wearing a security vest crouched outside on the tarmac…

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

By Austin Dacey

…entirely to make way for the announcer’s voiceover—“Please make sure your phone and all electronics are switched off and stowed”—as a single chord hovered to a simple four-beat pulse in the fashion of light pop radio. Gone were the jaunty, urbane syncopations that will forever mark the arrival of the jazz idiom—and with it the bluesy sinews of the American soul—to the hallowed halls of Western art music, smothered under a featureless musical goo…

Invited by Allah

By Amina Wadud

…e said more, something about the package. But I just wanted to get off the phone, so I could say out loud a soft, “yes!”, make a silent prayer of gratitude, and then just cry a little. I dressed in white to attend Friday prayer (not as the imam, mind you). Then later in the day, the mailman delivered my unscented cosmetics, from the Labayk Company; and my shoes came by parcel post, from Zappos. I put them on and started walking with them. Altogeth…

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

By Sarah Posner

…een 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 group Liberty Counsel and others, at Aloma Baptist Church in Winter Park, Florida, just north of Orlando. Gingrich was running late, so t…

On the 40th Anniversary of Hyde, A Theological Defense of Reproductive Justice

By Anita Little

…Bible out of which my conservative brothers and sisters pull these cheap one-liners to control the conversation about reproductive health also shows us the life and ministry of Jesus—whom we all claim to follow. The Jesus of the Gospel always treated poor people and people in crisis with compassion, never judgement. I don’t understand how you can claim to model yourself on Jesus while seeking to constantly judge and shame and limit people. This h…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…health campaign,” reports Gay Star News. “The campaign aimed to raise awareness on the negative effects of marginalization and discrimination on the health of LGBTI people.” Costa Rica: Report on municipalities making progress on being officially welcoming Roberto Acuña Ávalos at La Voz de Guanacaste writes that the area “timidly raises its own gay pride flag.” The story reviews nondiscrimination declarations that have been made by local municipal…

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

By Daniel Silliman

…eir DNA. John-Roger Hinkins The “way-shower”of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA), John-Roger Hinkins died at 80. Raised Mormon, Hinkins was a high school teacher in Southern California when he discovered “soul consciousness.”He founded MSIA—pronounced “messiah”—in 1971, teaching one could achieve a totally positive state of being with the help of the Mystical Traveler Consciousness he embodied. MSIA attracted celebrity followers inc…