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Suicide Leads to Calls for Improved Treatment of LGBT Mormons

By Joanna Brooks

…from the family’s home in North Carolina to Tennessee, and initiated legal proceedings to prevent Bryan from seeing them. She also contacted the bishop in her local Mormon congregation and “confessed Bryan’s sins for him.” Within two weeks, Bryan was excommunicated from the LDS Church. From the perspective of Mormon doctrine, his excommunication severed Bryan’s relationship to his children not only in this life, but also in the hereafter. Alone in…

Refusing Religion, Claiming the Future: A Roundtable Discussion on “The Nones Are Alright”

By Peter Laarman

…e country. Black youth continue to be mass incarcerated and pipelined into prisons in disproportionate numbers, while being marginalized in mainstream public school curricula. In the absence of truly democratic policies that provide equitable access to jobs, housing and education, the social and cultural institutions provided by some black churches, both alternative and traditional, represent an antidote to these inequities. Hence, while remaining…

Walking Dead and Zombie Ethics, or “Don’t Fight the Zombies. You Can’t Win”

By Kelly J. Baker

…le: these monsters are a five billion dollar industry. They appear in cell phone ads for Sprint, they chase runners in 5Ks, and they scare crowds at haunted houses and theme parks. With The Walking Dead and World War Z, zombies cemented their reign as the favored monster of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The zombie’s ubiquity begs for explanation, and there is no shortage of theories. David Denby, writing about World War Z …

“Even the Rich Suffer”: An Interview with Google’s Jolly Good Fellow Chade-Meng Tan

By Max Zahn

…ss is practicing mindfulness in order to become more successful. Is that a problem? I would say it’s not. I think the practice is so powerful that regardless of original intention, if you do the practice right you get the same outcome, the good outcome. In that corporate setting, the objective of mindfulness programs aligns with the students’ intentions—in other words, greater productivity at work. Without aspects of the practice that challenge th…

Mitt, the Marriotts, and Porn

By Joanna Brooks

…e Church Office Building. Among Mormons, porn is considered a very serious problem, primarily for the damage it does to the marriages and families of the porn-addicted. Anyone who wants to talk seriously about corporate profits and morality needs to do much better than paint Mitt Romney as a porn accomplice because he sat on the board of Marriott hotels. Who else has made money from the porn industry? If you have profited from the digital ec…

Departure of the Queen

By Amina Wadud

…e out to the mosque only because I am here for the company of my spiritual practice and the option to pray there brings me joy and comfort. I reflect back to the height of the weekend when guests and locals overflowed in the mosque, even spilling out to a tent set in the yard out front. Perhaps what I am feeling is a loss from all this company celebrating this time with the Queen. She has not yet departed after all, and we are still honored by her…

This Narrative of Death that is So Powerful Among Us

By Daniel Schultz

…m and revise them and revise them until they gel, so this was a slow-going process, a growing process that came out of my reading, and you’ve mentioned some of the authors. But I do a lot of circuit-riding in the church, and pay attention to some of the kinds of questions that people ask me when I do lecturing and preaching. It just seemed to me that those were ways of summarizing and solidifying the pathologies that are everywhere around us. Dan:…

Why We Can’t Afford to “Wait And See” How Trump Dismantles LGBT Rights

By Sunnivie Brydum

…the nation’s already weakened nondiscrimination laws. A sort of mutant offspring of Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana, FADA would provide carte-blanche cover for businesses, individuals, health care providers, and possibly even government officials to outright refuse service to LGBT people and certain women. What kind of “certain women,” you ask? The kind who dare to become pregnant withou…

What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?

By Haroon Moghul

…ction violence, Muslims have no choice but to act on it. There is just one problem with this way of interpreting all of Islam. Only a puny minority of Muslims acts in a violent manner, while the huge majority does not, though both are reading the same book. If Muslims don’t act in similar ways, the problem isn’t the Islamophobe’s interpretation of Islam, it’s anything else—perhaps the Muslims are practicing taqiyya! Or, perhaps, the Muslims don’t…

How (and Why) A Determined Sit-In Worked

By Daniel Schultz

…ch, but it looks like they’ve decided every seat matters. So you’re saying protests work? This protest worked. It had a single, clear, and achievable objective and a point of leverage. Give us a vote on this bill, or we’ll embarrass you in front of the nation. It’s important to say this on the one hand against the idea that Democrats should have fought for a better bill, or worked to “take the money out of politics” to limit the NRA’s effectivenes…