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

By Daniel Silliman

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…

Our Lady of Good Hope and Excellent Behavior: Why this Apparition and Why Now?

By Lisa Bitel

…rimages are much easier now, at least for the middle class that can afford plane tickets to Medjugorje and Civitavecchia. Pilgrims learn from major apparition sites exactly how to watch for the Virgin and what to do when someone spots her. And it’s much easier for the news of an apparition to reach reporters, now that visionaries and their witnesses use video cameras and the World Wide Web. President Obama made the news last week when he made a pi…

Pope Tweeted into Retirement

By Rachel Wagner

…ernet in the early nineties for most people consisted largely of acquiring plane tickets, reading relatively static documents, and emailing acquaintances. By 2004, the year before John Paul died, search engines had become sophisticated and powerful, and the immensely popular online world Second Life was in its third year. MySpace had appeared the year before, and Mark Zuckerberg was feverishly writing the code that would become Facebook. YouTube…

Orthodox TV Channel Offers Gays One-Way Ticket Out of Russia; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…at’ to Polish identity.” Russia: Orthodox TV channel offers to buy one-way tickets to help gay people leave country Tsargrad TV, a channel affiliated with right-wing Russian Orthodox activists and modeled after Fox News, offered to pay for a one-way ticket overseas for gay people who want to emigrate. The channel was funded by Konstantin Maofeev, a billionaire known as “God’s oligarch” who dreams of Vladimir Putin becoming a Tsar. More from the BB…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…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…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…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…

Behind the Inclusive-Sounding Ads of this $100 Million PR-Blitz-for-Jesus it’s the Same Old Conservative Christian Fantasy

By Chrissy Stroop

…in a way that’s accessible and demonstrable to those of us on this mortal plane—and who is, despite the release of yet another major documentary last year, almost certainly bigger than the Beatles. Despite all that, some conservative Christians are apparently one-hundred million dollars worth of concerned that the enduringly popular Mr. of Nazareth just isn’t doing it for some of the kids these days. Hence, the rebrand to make the ostensible son…

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

By Haroon Moghul

…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…

World Congress of Families Draws Anti-LGBT Activists to Budapest; More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…urt, who is now a church pastor, said she would try to avoid flying Qantas airlines due to the company’s public stance in favor of marriage equality. In response, Martina Navratilova called for changing the name of the Margaret Court Arena, a site of the Australian Open. A few years ago, Court had written a letter to a newspaper denouncing an article about the birth of a baby boy to a gay couple’ in the letter she described herself as “a patron of…

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By Lisa Miller

…houris, dark-eyed women. We all know that Mohammad Atta, who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers on 9/11, was inspired by this promise. But among progressives, the sex promised to the righteous in the Qur’an isn’t sex as we know it, but something mysterious and sublime for which sex is a poetic stand-in. Second, what happens to our bodies in heaven? This is my favorite part of the heaven conversation. For if you believe in heaven…