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

…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…

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

…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…

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

…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 the event co-spon…

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

No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…

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

…ality of the legal provision that defines marriage as between a man and a woman. The story by Marlene Testa suggests that there has not been a major political push for such a change and that religious beliefs are an obstacle [clumsy English via Google translate]: The lawyer Germán Rodríguez approaches the subject from two perspectives: the human and the religious. From the human point of view, he is convinced, but religion is more restrictive and…

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

…me Court ruling of May 5 which enabled gay people to marry on the island. Romania: Opposition leader steps down over party’s opposition to marriage amendment Nicusor Dan, founder and leader of the opposition party USR resigned from the party on May 31 after the party’s national bureau voted to oppose a proposed “traditional family” revision to the constitution that would restrict marriage as the union between a man and a woman. Cambodia: Oppositio…

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Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…

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Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…

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

…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?)   The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…

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Religious Affiliation, ‘Mankind’: India’s Anti-Corruption Activist Leads Second Freedom Struggle

phone and check it for messages. Sure enough, I had one from an unfamiliar number. A woman’s voice said Bedi was still sleeping, exhausted from the previous day’s overseas flight, and needed to reschedule our interview for that afternoon. I called the number back, convinced the opportunity was lost. “I’m here at the hotel now, but I’m booked solid this afternoon—” “Hold on, let me check with her,” the woman told me. There was a brief pause. “She s…

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