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Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

By Sarah M. Pike

…ose “Burners” who are true converts, it is a religious event on a massive scale. Casseopeia, a 28-year-old adjunct professor at a large state university told me that Burning Man is her only “religious holiday.” For true believers, mundane life pales in comparison to this annual Labor Day gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Often tagged as a countercultural festival, it is not really that at all. Burners are the culture, and among its most pri…

Invited by Allah

By Amina Wadud

…tual. Nice plan. So I went to the embassy to get the visa and was denied because (as an American) I needed proof that I was Muslim. How do I prove I have been a practicing Muslim for a decade? I went to the famous al-Azhar university and secured a shahadah document in French, Arabic and English. I returned to the embassy and was told one has to be Muslim for at least six months to make hajj. So I go to the American embassy and secure an affidavit…

Refusing the Monsters on Maple Street: A First-Person Commentary from the Mass Hysteria at JFK

By Marion Grau

…stic security, and counter-terrorism programming. If terrorism is geopolitical, it’s because it damages psyches as much as bodies. In emphasizing the geopolitical aspect of its “War on Terror,” has the West missed the fact that it has been colonized by a psychic terrorism—one inspired as much by the hypervigilant paranoia of homeland security and law enforcement as by any actual terrorist activity? This is the hypothesis I have grappled with after…

An Open Letter to CEO Jeff Smisek On United Airlines’ Blasphemous Safety Video

By Austin Dacey

…the hallowed halls of Western art music, smothered under a featureless musical goo and carried off to further mutilations I will not relate here. Mr. Smisek, I am not a religious person. If I can be said to adhere to any confession, it is that primordial, preliterate one that has sprung forth everywhere ever since we beings were human: the covenant of sound. You and your associates have desecrated a work of transcendent beauty and blasphemed Music…

Gingrich Downplays Adelson Money, Stokes Fear of “Second Holocaust” at Florida Church

By Sarah Posner

…igious right leaders seem to see this moment, even if Gingrich or Santorum can’t catch Romney, to build a Christian get-out-the-vote drive for the general election and beyond. Don Wildmon, the American Family Association founder, bankroller of Rick Perry’s The Response rally, and now-endorser of Gingrich, introduced the list of registrants at The Response to United in Purpose, writing at the time that “research has shown that it takes only 5 milli…

‘Anti-Romeo’ Vigilante Squads Target Men Suspected Of Being Gay; More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ality, and the Sydney Morning Herald reports that they have launched a new campaign, which came “in stark defiance of Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s advice to ‘stick to their knitting’.” The initiative invites customers to order one of 250,000 specially-commissioned rings bearing the phrase “until we all belong” – which will also appear on Qantas boarding passes and other paraphernalia. The ring is incomplete, representing the “gap” in equali…

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

By Daniel Silliman

…2001 to 2006. Douglas McArthur McCain At 33 years old, Douglas McArthur McCain became the first American killed while fighting for the jihadist group ISIS. McCain was raised in mainstream American culture, a fan of Michael Jordan, “The Simpsons”and Pizza Hut. He reverted to Islam, as he described it, in 2004. “I must say In sha Allah,”he wrote, using an Arabic phrase meaning “God willing,”“I will never look back.”He began publicly identifying wit…

Conservative Bishops Unhappy At Synod, But Ignore Walkout Call; Australian Religious Leaders Step Up Marriage Equality Opposition; Italy Debates Civil Unions; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e particularly eye-opening speech to the assembly last week, a leading African cardinal blasted the “idolatry of Western freedom” as equivalent to “Islamic fundamentalism” and compared both to “apocalyptic beasts.” Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, a top official in the Roman Curia, also said that divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage in the West, and Islamic fundamentalism in Africa and elsewhere, both had a “demonic origin” that the synod had t…

An Open Letter to Black Clergy on the Disdain for Protest

By Rev. Osagyefo Sekou

…preaching tradition. In pure awe, I watched you hold congregations in the palm of your hand with rhetorical flourishes, giving a beat-down-people strength to live another day. Your words helped to re-constitute an assaulted black self—with respectability, dignity and self-determination. I studied how you mounted the sacred desk. The way that you ‘took and walked’ a text was a dissertation in performance and homiletical studies. I took avid notes….

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Blames Gays For ISIS; ‘Christian Nationalist’ Sworn In As Guatemala’s President; Vatican Resists Civil Unions in Italy; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…and mass killings that Morales has said cannot be considered genocide. Vatican: Catholic Officials Fight Civil Unions in Italy; Pope Fighting Curia’s ‘Gay Lobby’? On Friday, Pope Francis declared that “there can be no confusion between the family as willed by God, and every other type of union.” Meanwhile, in Italy, the last country in Western Europe that does not legally recognize same-sex couples, the parliament is preparing to debate civil unio…