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

By Joseph Laycock

…ous Games: What the Moral Panic Over Role-Playing Games Says About Religion, Play, and Imagined Worlds (University of California Press, 2015). It should come out in February. This book was a labor of love and I’m very excited about it. It explores why games of the imagination like Dungeons and Dragons became such a source of panic to conservative Christians during the 1980s. I think this book will be very cathartic for anyone from my generation wh…

Who’s Accusing Who of Mormon-Baiting?

By Joanna Brooks

…ign with “Mormon baiting.” The evidence? A report in US News & World Report, based on one blog piece by Deal Hudson, president of the Pennsylvania Catholics Network, a conservative Catholic advocacy group, who is accusing Catholics for Obama of staging an anti-Mormon “whispering campaign” against Mitt Romney. Deal wrote that one Catholic friend told him she had been called by a phonebanker who identified herself as Catholic and asked, “How can yo…

“Symbolic” Personhood Bill Could Kill

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ve pro-life state—we are proud to stand up for what we know is right.” Well, yes, it feels very good to be proud of things, doesn’t it? Might I suggest that not everything one is proud of needs to be enshrined in a badly-worded and vague law which, if enforced, could kill someone? Accordingly, as a resident of Oklahoma, an Oklahoma voter, and a Tulsan who likes my city a lot, I have a few questions for the bill’s supporters: 1. I would like to kno…

Maryland Governor says Support for Marriage Equality “Very Much Informed” by his Catholicism

By Peter Montgomery

…rganizations and certain related entities are not required to provide goods, services, or benefits to an individual related to the celebration or promotion of marriage in violation of their religious beliefs.” Josh Levin, who directs the pro-equality campaign, said it is working with several hundred clergy, and said a volunteer group of equality-supporting Catholics is doing weekly phone banks. Levin mentioned last Friday’s press conference with e…

Suicide Leads to Calls for Improved Treatment of LGBT Mormons

By Joanna Brooks

…s within Bryan’s family as they tried to come to terms with the loss of son, husband, and father. But the story became public. And now, advocacy groups are mobilizing around Bryan’s story to demand that LDS Church leaders do more for gay Church members. Within gay Mormon communities, there is debate over whether focusing on gay suicides actually works to change Mormon hearts and minds. But in the wake of Bryan’s death, many Mormons—LGBT and otherw…

Where are the Clergy? A Report from Occupy DC

By Sarah Posner

…the guy in the Ben’s Chili Bowl hat,” Merritt told me on the phone. Merritt, 42, was inspired by the movement’s goals of confronting structural economic problems, a tack that he says has largely been ignored by progressive religious activism. As to why there isn’t more of a religious presence at the Occupy protests, “I think about that a lot,” said Merritt. “I think: exactly what happened? What happened? Why aren’t there 50 clergy?” That could be,…

Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…One speaker ventures that 90% of the prayers in America consists of “Please, God, help me find my flip flops.” When a speaker screws up and apologizes to the audience, there is a chorus of “Jesus forgives you.” Remarks from audience members who stand and take turns to speak at the mic: “There are 435 members of Congress and almost all of them are our enemies.” “If we could take the brainpower of this room and pool it, it would be fantastic.” “We…

Qaddafi Dies; Should it Matter How?

By Haroon Moghul

…on took, I wanted Qaddafi gone. And now he is gone. But I sense in his rise, fall, and expiration a moral lesson we seem uninterested in. He vowed to hunt down his people like rats, street-by-street and house-by-house. In the end, they hunted him down, chasing him from his palaces and attacking him in his own gaudy vanity projects. He made his last stand near the buildings he had lavished Sirte with. He who accused al-Qaeda of being behind Libya’s…

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

By Rachel Wagner

…found in video games “express processes in [broader] culture that are large, unknown, dangerous, and painful.” If Galloway is right, then Kuma Games’ immediate impulse to create a video game about Qaddafi’s capture may be more than just a marketing ploy (though it is that as well). The desire to translate events like Qaddafi’s and bin Laden’s deaths into video games is also part of what we might call algorithmic sorting: the cultural attempt to si…

White House Position
on Exemption from Contraception Coverage
“Not a Done Deal”?

By Sarah Posner

…eaning.” The Washington Post reports this morning that Democratic Senators, on a phone call yesterday with White House senior advisor David Plouffe, argued against adopting the Bishops’ position. My source says it’s “not a done deal” yet, but expected action from the White House within a week. UPDATE: Another womens’ rights advocate tells me that she has “no reason to think” that the Obama administration feels it “owes” the Bishops for health ca…