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Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…is about.” You don’t need the Buddha Considering its origin story, it’s appropriate that MNDFL’s studio is sandwiched between a hair salon and a nail salon, deep in the Village. The décor is a mix of wood, white paint, and plants, which cover patches of the walls in living installations. Upon entering, visitors are invited to take off their shoes and make a cup of tea. Next to the check-in desk, MNDFL offers its merchandise, including $40 T-shirt…

Love the Compassion Dogs, Hate the Anti-Gay Theology?

By Sean O'Neil

…inful.” Hard to imagine that language framed with a rainbow filter. Not surprisingly, then, Nadia Bolz-Weber—the most recognizable face of the more liberal expression of Lutheranism in the United States, The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America—has referred to the LCMS as “a rather sectarian and fundamentalist part of the Lutheran family tree.” Still, the theology of sexuality of the LCMS bears resemblance to that of a far wider church family th…

The Grand Old Homonationalist Party: The Issue that Keeps the Log Cabin Republicans, Republican

By Omar Sarwar

…unity, Angelo seems to have taken his cue from his party’s otherwise doubt-provoking presidential nominee. If the safety of LGBT Americans isn’t compelling enough, LCR extend Gingrich’s appeal to feminists and anti-racist liberals, declaring (again, in the absence of any substantive proof) that a portion of “radicalized” Muslims in the US specifically target women and religious minorities. In fact, the advocacy organization has gone a step further…

Bishop Says Gay Couples Cannot Be Part of Parish Life; Does Rising Evangelical Political Power in Brazil Contribute to Anti-LGBT Violence?; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…responsibility.” That is why, he said, St. John Paul II believed it was “appropriate to encourage the divorced and remarried to participate more fully in the life of the church,” although without access to the Eucharist. “Pope Francis, in a cultural context of even more advanced secularization and pansexualism, is going even further, but along the same lines,” the cardinal wrote. “Without being silent on the objective truth, he is concentrating hi…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…tles’ (evolution vs. creationism, science vs. religion) may sell books and tickets for both ‘sides,’ productive engagement and nuance is sacrificed. Expelled, on the positive side does show us some interviews with balanced, thoughtful scientist/religion scholars like John Polkinghorne and Alister McGrath. They discuss the value of science and religion and other ways of thinking, and how productive dialogues among them, rather than battle rhetoric,…

Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

By Jay Michaelson

…a Jewish far-right organization named “Emergency Committee for Israel” has produced a cheap YouTube video showing a couple of crazy people at Occupy Wall Street shouting antisemitic slogans. For good measure, they’ve thrown in Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Eliot Spitzer endorsing the sentiments behind the Occupy movement; ergo, the three of them must hate the Jews too. This, of course, is ridiculous. As everybody should know by now, Occupy is a…

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…of an impostor, a usurper, a false messiah, who happens to be the sitting president. Pretty much every Romney speech tells the story of how this imposter’s hope proved to be a false hope. Romney is clearly trying to plead for the souls of those who voted for Obama the first time. Romney’s message: “It’s okay, I understand the seduction: they don’t call Satan the ‘Father of Lies’ for nothing.” But far more potent than the trashing of Obama in the…

U.S. Bishops’ Silence on Guns and Gays

By Patricia Miller

…guns and gays. While the bishops’ conference officially backs gun control proposals put forward by President Obama and the Democratic Party, it has put almost no energy into pushing for them. Imagine if Catholic bishops rallied from the pulpit against politicians who failed to vote for common sense gun control legislation with the same energy they put into opposing John Kerry and other Catholic politicians who support abortion rights? Or with the…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…er surveys find higher percentages using more generous methodologies.) The number of priests and nuns has declined precipitously; from 58,000 to 38,000 for priests and from 125,000 to 50,000 for nuns. Despite a significantly larger population, there are 1,300 fewer parishes, with an average of just one priest per parish; some 3,500 parishes have no resident priest. The sacraments are no longer as central to the lives of Catholics. The number of ba…

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

By Sarah M. Pike

…For “bad Catholics” and other backsliding Burners, confession is a popular practice, promoted this year at the Shame Project, a piece by Alissa Mortenson, which proclaimed “I am not a sinner. I don’t need to be saved and neither do you.” A City of Porous Boundaries It is easy to dismiss the privileged spiritual yearnings of successful middle-class Westerners who come out to the desert to blow stuff up as inconsequential, and yet Burning Man offers…