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Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…it? Did your insides light up like a pinball machine? Did you annotate and highlight and earmark and bookmark and run to the phone to call your girlfriend because you found a Scripture that was God speaking to you? “That’s why we know more than they do. You need to tell your Christian friends to read the Bible. Reading the Bible makes atheists. Christian education makes atheists. I’ve given the Bible to my fourteen-year-old daughter and I’ve asked…

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

By Sarah M. Pike

…kepocalypse”: for the first time ever, the event sold out. Scalpers hawked tickets for hundreds of dollars over their purchase price and artists who had been working feverishly to finish their projects but had put off purchasing tickets were left out in the cold. It was a different scene in 1997 when I first came to Burning Man and only waited briefly at the entrance as a “Greeter” cast a cursory glance at my car. But the Greeters’ enthusiastic re…

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

…items within their borders (as is already the case federally with lottery tickets). A Republican-controlled Congress could then impose a nationwide ban on the mailing of abortion pills or certain contraceptives. (Republican-controlled state legislatures have already demonstrated a willingness to enact questionable legislation for nothing more than its intimidation factor.) Which brings us back to Anthony Comstock. In 1878, the Supreme Court uphel…

Death in the Desert: Riding With the Samaritans

By Lauri Lebo

…th water, Gatorade, crackers, socks, clothes, and medical supplies. As the sky gradually turns from black to indigo, we start gazing into the brush along the highway, looking for the tired and lost. Deadliest Year Brother David and Millsap are volunteers with the Samaritans, an organization that patrols the desert seeking people from Mexico and Central America who have crossed the Arizona border south of here and are making their way north for job…

Invited by Allah

By Amina Wadud

…ry conveniently located vis-à-vis the Arabian Peninsula, it is also a very highly populated Muslim country and too many people request visas for hajj. Like Indonesia, one has to plan two or three years in advance. No walking up to the embassy three weeks before. So, mostly I was nervous because of the failed experience before—I know what it is like to be denied. But honestly that is only part of the problem. In 2005, I was invited to lead a Friday…

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

By Marion Grau

…alse—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 in the 100 meters sounded like gunfire. In an episode titled “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” from…

National Association of Evangelicals Supports Immigration Reform, But Elsewhere Discord Reigns

By Donna Schaper

…live between a rock and a hard place. We are rarely in favor of pie in the sky. There is nothing pie-ish or sky-ish about recognizing that we have laws that have been broken, laws that are irregularly, at best, enforced, laws that were confused from the get-go. One of the immigrant members of our congregation has lived under a changing series of immigration laws in his lifetime: all progressively worse for him. He had a green card. He did a non-vi…

Everything Was Better When We Had God In Our Schools

By Hollis Phelps

…rk City, New York. A 17-year-old student shot a boy in the Manual Training High School. • May 1, 1958, Massapequa, New York. A 15-year-old high school freshman was shot and killed by a classmate in a washroom of the Massapequa High School. • September 24, 1959, New York City, New York. Twenty-seven men and boys and an arsenal were seized in the Bronx last night as the police headed off a gang war resulting from the fatal shooting of a teenager Mon…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…epublic is a country controlled by religious Catholics” and said Brewster “highlighted all of the discrimination that exists towards the LGBT community in the country.” Brewster drew vocal criticism from conservative religious leaders during his tenure: Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez, the former cardinal of the Archdiocese of Santo Domingo, repeatedly used anti-gay slurs to describe Brewster. A group of Dominican intellectuals and religious lead…

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

By Daniel Silliman

…reness (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 including Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington a…