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Escape From Manhattan: Tech, Tragedy and Storytelling in Sandy’s Wake

By Rachel Wagner

…And nobody can deny the convenience of ready access to information, maps, phone numbers, calendars, and social satisfaction that our reliance on technology provides. Technology is a tool, right? It doesn’t change who we are, right? It doesn’t blind us—it reveals reality by connecting us and showing us the world via our screens… right? Look, I know that our new imaginative, mediated work is doing good. I know people can feel a real sense of empowe…

Church Uses Facebook for Sacramental Scrutiny at its Peril

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ed up generating more confusion than contrition when a not particularly social design invited people to conclude that absolution was granted by way of the Confession app itself rather than, according to Catholic teaching, through the mediation of the priest. No wonder Pope Benedict XVI’s Message for World Communications Day earlier this year highlighted silence and listening—the heart of Christian practices of contemplation—by way of encouraging t…

US Names Int’l Envoy for LGBT Rights; Marriage revolution spreads in Mexico; Scott Lively Warns World of Anti-Christ; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…collected more than 166,000 signatures to bring it before the Finnish Parliament. Kazakhstan: Russian-style anti-gay bill advances The Kazakhstan Senate passed a bill similar to Russia’s ban on anti-gay “propaganda,” legislation that has been used to target activists and journalists in Russia. The bill’s sponsors promote it as a measure to “protect children from harmful information.” Member of Parliament Aldan Smayil said the legislation’s intent…

Joyless Primaries Grind On

By Joanna Brooks

…s we witnessed late last summer and fall. In fact, while evangelical Christians continue to opt for Santorum as the not-Romney, there is little solid data that isolates anti-Mormonism as the cause: region, social conservatism, and economic class also drive the narrative. As the race moves past Super Tuesday, the real story is the grind that the 2012 race is becoming. Its dispiriting effects on voters. The distorting effects of Super PAC cash. And…

Even Tougher Questions to Ask Mormon Presidential Candidates

By Joanna Brooks

…idual contribution from you to the Yes on 8 campaign or any other anti-marriage-equality initiative? If so, how did you respond? How would you respond in such a situation? 2. Mormonism is an openly patriarchal religious culture—one of the most patriarchal modern cultures on the face of the earth. Your own father is (or was) an extremely powerful and wealthy man with great influence within LDS culture and beyond. How have you personally benefitted…

Suicide Leads to Calls for Improved Treatment of LGBT Mormons

By Joanna Brooks

…it was a year ago this weekend that Elder Boyd K. Packer gave a controversial General Conference talk shaming homosexuality. “I have a brother who said to me on the phone last Christmas, ‘Elder Packer says God does not make gays. This is your choice.’ And then he used some very hurtful language with me,” Jahn relates. “I had to hang up on him. But he feels he has been given permission to speak this way by the prophet.” “Even a simple phrase utter…

Where are the Clergy? A Report from Occupy DC

By Sarah Posner

…rritt, the gregarious, affable pastor of the ecumenical, progressive Palisades Christian Church in the District. “I’ll be the guy in the Ben’s Chili Bowl hat,” Merritt told me on the phone. Merritt, 42, was inspired by the movement’s goals of confronting structural economic problems, a tack that he says has largely been ignored by progressive religious activism. As to why there isn’t more of a religious presence at the Occupy protests, “I think ab…

God Dissolves into the Occupy Movement

By Nathan Schneider

…d John Lewis from speaking at Occupy Atlanta has spoken out. He is Joseph Diaz, a 24-year-old Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Emory University, and a self-described Christian: Asked if he could sum up his politics with a political label, Diaz said, “First and foremost, I’m a Christian.” Then he added a lot of qualifiers like any good philosophy Ph.D. student, but in the end he told me: “I believe in the radical egalitarian community of the Holy S…

Qaddafi Dies; Should it Matter How?

By Haroon Moghul

…elevant—would postwar Europe have been very different had Hitler gone on trial? But Hitler had taken his own life, and with it the Nazi cause. His few remaining diehard loyalists could not claim he was mistreated. Seeing a wounded, bloodied Qaddafi jeered at and propped up on a pickup truck, then stumbling and terrified, I saw a human [warning: graphic video here]. The myth of the dictator had come spectacularly undone. His claim to power and his…

Will a Video Game Make Sense of Qaddafi’s Death?

By Rachel Wagner

…pture in a game is the widespread degree of ignorance that contemporary media allows, especially in hyper-wired places like the United States where we vigorously defend our myopia even as we deny we have it. We see only those news stories we wish to see, and we see them in as fragmented a form as we wish. This, we claim, is “freedom.” We often feel we need know nothing at all of the historical or social situations that give rise to important clima…