…t President Yoweri Museveni used in a ceremonial signing of the anti-gay bill in Uganda. This year Gambia’s president Yahya Jammeh called for gay people’s throats to be slit. Alimi says it was a huge task to prepare to teach a course on pre- and post-colonial sexual orientation and sexual identity in Africa. In digging up facts I found that, while many Africans say that homosexuality is un-African, African culture is no stranger to homosexual beha…
…r its city council voted unanimously to decriminalize entheogens, or naturally occurring psychoactive drugs consumed for religious reasons. Substances like psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, and ibogaine remain illegal at the state and federal levels, but cities like Hazel Park are invoking their religiosity as they decriminalize entheogens at the local level. To understand the term entheogen and its relationship to the broader effort to decriminali…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…st been dealt a damaging blow. The secretive movement (known also as the Fellowship) hit the big time last week, having been dragged into the spotlight by a pair of extramarital affairs, and allegations of a hush money payment in the upper echelons of government. For a primer on the Family and the scandals involving Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and John Ensign (R-NV), and Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC)—all of whom are connected by the Fellowship—watch the fo…
…fact that I’ve ostensibly cast aside the mantle of religion once and for all, I continue to fast for the holy month of Ramadan—or Ramzan, as South Asians tend to call it—which concludes this year on the 23rd or 24th of May, depending on the moon. This year is a return to form for me as I took a hiatus from Ramadan for several years. I’d fasted more or less regularly ever since I was an adolescent, following September 11th when I first became reli…
…d was not religious in the slightest (though he had a surprisingly large collection of books about the historical Jesus), but the children’s Bible with pastel illustrations I got from Sunday School demanded a dignified, literarily respectable replacement. I couldn’t make much sense of King James, but I enjoyed leafing through the pages—more gold, on their edges!—and sensing some vague power in the sheer overwhelming quantity of words they containe…
…e brine only to emerge a century later unchanged, An American Pickle is really about death; or more precisely the way we become totally absorbed in it and the way we live our lives avoiding it. Like you, every day I’m inundated with death counts occupying the top right corner of almost every news screen. It reminds me of listening, as a young adolescent, to the nightly news in the early 1970s as the anchor duly reported the number of US soldiers k…
…s a committed Jewish atheist. So she could see that someone could live a fully ethical life and not have religious faith. But I worried that I also had failed, because of my own complicated feelings about Catholicism. I felt a lot of guilt about her upbringing. At the same time, I was having my own crisis of faith. The papacy of Pope Benedict XVI in particular was trying. He had such a dour world view. He changed the prayers we say at Mass, and ma…
…xteenth century, he believed for a time that his mission was going quite well. With the help of a former samurai, whom he had converted at the start of his travels in Japan, he translated and memorized sections of the Gospels in order to explain himself to the locals. He told everyone he met that he was there to teach about Dainichi, the word his translator told him was a close enough approximation of God. One of the first Jesuits, Francis was a f…
…had made appearances on Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and The Ellen Show just to name a few. In the midst of his tour, Magnificent Coloring World, he sold out the U.S. Cellular field, the former name of his hometown Chicago White Sox’s stadium. All the while his personal faith was at the center. The almost-24-year-old is the epitome of the young black millennial aesthetic. Born after Bill Clinton was inaugurated as presid…
The Global Alliance for LGBT Education has protested the selection of Saudi Arabia as the site for a forum on youth engagement in social change: The forum, “Youth and their Social Impact”, is supposed to explore youth engagement and its potential for social change and to educate for a sustainable future. A specific break-out workshop will be about using digital tools for the promotion of social interaction and engagement. In Saudi Arabia, dating…