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Religion or Insanity? Two Upcoming Murder Trials Will Ask the (Burning) Question

By Joseph Laycock

…ve written on the case of John Errol Ferguson, a schizophrenic murderer in Florida, who claimed that upon his execution he alone would be seated at the Right Hand of God before being resurrected to save America from a communist plot. Under federal law, the mentally ill cannot be executed—psychiatrists had even identified a fissure in Ferguson’s brain consistent with schizophrenia. However, Florida’s eighth circuit ruled that Ferguson’s delusions w…

The Environmental Politics of Vodou, New Orleans Style

By Joseph Laycock

…especially, race. This matrix of associations is evident in the example of phone psychics like “Miss Cleo,” who uses an affected Caribbean accent. We also saw it in Pat Robertson’s gaffe following the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, when he claimed that the nation of Haiti had made a pact with the Devil. Glassman conforms to no stereotypes about Vodou. Born in Maine, her parents were of Ukrainian Jewish heritage but were not religious. S…

As Long As There’s Fear, We Aren’t Ready for Atheism: A Conversation with Theologian and Ex-Priest Daniel Maguire

By Alana Massey

…in the morning and seeing the sun shine and the sky blue and the birds in flight and saying, ‘Thank you God,’ and you’re taking that away from me.” You write “theism promises simplicity and security and delivers neither,” but you do refer to a world that was “not yet ready for atheism.” Do you believe the world is now ready for atheism? As long as there is fear, it will never be fully ready. Fear makes you reach for a supernatural insurance polic…

From The Virgin Mary to a Housewife in Queens: Inside The Seer of Bayside

By Joseph Laycock

…een contested. What we imagine as normative is actually the result of a conflict in which one party seized the power to define what normal is. I see the story of the Baysiders as a struggle to define what the core values of Catholicism are in the wake of Vatican II. For the most part, the Baysiders lost that battle, but their story reveals some of the motivations of lay Catholics and the tactics they can use to assert their own understanding of th…

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

…LGBT people. Two days after the fire at Zhovten, about a dozen men in camouflage and the insignia of the ultranationalist group Right Sector tried to shut down another LGBT film screening, calling it “amoral.” Asked at the recent Eurocities Conference how he would support human rights after the Zhovten homophobic attacks, Maidan’s hero and current Kiev mayor Vitali Klitschko said he considered human rights a good thing, but would “not stand up for…

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

…cussions with global LGBT activists, this one with Anastasia Smirnova, who fled the country after having been arrested for psoting an LGBT banner at the Sochi Olympics. Mexico: ‘Quiet marriage equality revolution’ spreads BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder, with research assistance from journalist Rex Wockner, reports on the wave of marriage equality rulings in Mexico since a Supreme Court ruling in late 2012 in favor of a lesbian couple from Oaxaca: “Courts…

Suicide Leads to Calls for Improved Treatment of LGBT Mormons

By Joanna Brooks

…s. But in the wake of Bryan’s death, many Mormons—LGBT and otherwise—are reflecting on the kind of support our communities are capable of offering gay Mormons who feel they can no longer hide their sexuality. I’ve heard LDS Church members ask whether excommunication is the best institutional response to gay Mormons in acute spiritual struggle or crisis. I’ve also heard Mormons reflect on how despite some signs of increased awareness and outreach b…

Safety Not Guaranteed

By Jeanne Carstensen

…gns of the water’s path: parked cars askew in the street, on the sidewalk; flooded basement after flooded basement; ribbons of detritus strewn in patterns that look like the banks of a rushing stream. As if it had been following the outlines of the map the flood stopped just short of Avenue B, not touching our Orange side of the street. * Zooming in, zooming out—calculating the odds. It gave me a desperately needed illusion of control in the face…

Church Uses Facebook for Sacramental Scrutiny at its Peril

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ocial and mobile forms that have shaped relational practice both on- and offline, has generally retained the democratic, collaborative, transparent, and dialogical ethos of its earliest enthusiasts. No reasonable communicator these days, then, expects a passive mass of consumers to gobble up a magisterially-broadcast message whole, not having the opportunity to share their own, potentially influential, perspectives. Hence those Twitter hashtags a…

Electionpocalypse, Part I (Christianity)

By Sarah Posner

…r every single baby legally aborted God will require the blood of the same number of people, which is between 30-50 million Americans!” he writes. (NB: this “pro-life” position bears more of a relationship to a book on numerology than the Book of Numbers.) Anti-marriage equality crusader Bishop Harry Jackson, who is African American, urges readers to vote for Romney “as a statement of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.” While King was sitting in the…