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Why I Won’t Leave the Mormon Church Alone

By Holly Welker

…ve been but no longer be a devout Mormon. Luckily a diverse community of ex-, post-, or lapsed Mormons (we differ on what to call ourselves) thrives on the internet. Another thing that makes leaving Mormonism difficult is how little it is understood by the world at large. It’s frustrating to have to explain fundamental elements of the church before discussing the crisis of faith those elements prompted. Mormonism has unusual and esoteric doctrines…

AAA: Like a Good Neighbor

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…de of the road with a flat tire, or a broken down car, that help is just a phone call away. It also gives me discounts on lodging and other perks. My partner has a gold card with her name on it as well. The account number on both cards is the same. Years ago, when we signed up for the cards with the venerable roadside assistance company AAA, the woman at the counter smiled sweetly and never blinked an eye when we asked for the “family” plan. We we…

Pope Decries ‘Ideological Colonization’ of Family; Islamic State Executes Gays and Others; Gay Couple Gets Long-Delayed Wedding in Mexico; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ster Feder and Maged Atef report from Cairo that IbrahimMonsour, the editor-in-chief of the Tahrir News, a leading liberal newspaper, told them, “These are instructions from the state apparatus” to cover sex scandals and other “silly” issues. Monsour said he believed the government wanted coverage of arrests for homosexuality and other “morality” charges in order to distract from political stories that could expose how the government had betrayed…

The Tweets of the Christ

By Nathan Schneider

…By the end, closer to 2,000. Attendees’ names included the likes of Church-in-the-Garden, Miller Funeral Home, bitterperl, plus lots of regular folks. There were six characters in the play, each speaking from a separate Twitter handle, acting out the story of Jesus’ torture and death. Save a handful of exceptions (“bad feeling about this”), they used complete sentences. There were few lapses into Twitterish, that dialect descended from instant me…

On Harith, and Matters of Inheritance

By Amina Wadud

…al guidelines, with room to—no, more like a mandate to—adjudicate on a case-by-case basis. We cannot predetermine shares at all. I once calculated if I divided the bequest (legally restricted to one-third) between my three daughters (although some jurists say you cannot bequest to legal heirs), then divided the remainder what would happen. They would have slightly more than the share to my two sons. Then I thought, its not like Allah cannot do the…

“Fast for Families” Immigration Reform Effort Enters 20th Day

By Joanna Brooks

…As Cristian grew too weak to continue his fast in public, Sam Adair, a self-described “active” Mormon, father of three and immigration attorney from Austin, Texas, traveled to stand on the mall. RD: How did you come to be fasting for immigration reform on the national mall in Washington, D.C.? SA: My concern about immigration reform started when was 14 or 15 years old and had a job picking watermelons on a farm outside of Phoenix, and I was the o…

Bedside Manners: The Broken Spirituality of Contemporary US Medical Practice

By Peter Laarman

…soul. “Wrongly relinquishes the soul”: this clearly isn’t normal physician-speak, but then Jerome Groopman is no ordinary physician. He is an old-fashioned humanist who is willing to acknowledge the deep mystery at the heart of the human being in which body and spirit are intertwined. This is not quite the same as the celebrated “mind-body problem,” although that interface is another great mystery. The spirit-body connection is one that almost ev…

The US Religious Right and the LGBT Crisis In Uganda

By Sarah Posner

…f the American Family Association, and an ally of the AFA’s virulently anti-gay policy director Bryan Fischer, led a three-day conference that Kaggwa says sparked a “panic” in evangelical and Pentecostal churches that the “gay agenda” was poised to cause the downfall of Ugandan families and culture. During the conference, Lively blamed gay people for the 1994 Rwandan genocide, equated homosexuality with Nazism, and more generally asserted that gay…

The ‘Unified Reich’ Scandal is a Feature Not a Bug of Trump’s Brand of American Fascism

By Annika Brockschmidt

…een wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. And even the various would-be mini-Trumps and their campaigns employed fascist rhetoric, with Ron DeSantis promising to “slit the throats” of “bureaucrats” to rid the imaginary “Deep State” of the Right’s enemies on his first day in office. DeSantis’ campaign even had its own Nazi-scandal, with staffer Nate Hochman posting a video including not only alt-right, incel-manosphere imagery, but an actual…

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

By Rachel Wagner

…his is merely a familiar storyline. The footage can easily be read as a cut-scene of a game well-played, with the fat-cat “boss” ultimately defeated by triumphant third-person shooter heroes. Well played. Level up, Libyans. It remains to be seen if Kuma Games will incorporate any of this real video into their framing of the game, but even if they don’t, for many players the footage will become a part of the “backstory” as they “help” the Libyan p…