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Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…g. What attracted you to Brazil as the location for your research? I heard about an experimental prison system based in Minas Gerais, a state next to Rio de Janeiro. In about 30 prisons they don’t have any guards. The premise is that the guard-inmate relationship is always violent, so there’s a code of conduct that is enforced by the inmates themselves. They’re hoping to export this model to Africa and other countries in South America, so they wer…

My Childhood Hobby Was Satanic, Or So They Told Me

By Joseph Laycock

…my favorite hobby is satanic. When grown-ups told me that playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) was going to drive me insane or cause me to worship the devil, it suddenly dawned on me that adults were fallible: They ran the schools, the churches, and the police, but they didn’t always think rationally or know what they were talking about. After that, I never saw the social order in the same way again. I became the sort of teenager who has “a problem wi…

WA Supreme Court: LGBT Discrimination No More About Flowers Than Civil Rights Were About Sandwiches

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…e court held: We emphatically reject this argument…”[t]his case is no more about access to flowers than civil rights cases in the 1960s were about access to sandwiches.” Br. of Resp’ts Ingersoll and Freed at 32. As every other court to address the question has concluded, public accommodations laws do not simply guarantee access to goods or services. Instead, they serve a broader societal purpose: eradicating barriers to the equal treatment of all…

Rand Paul, Religious Skeptic?

By Sarah Posner

…Not a word about the religious freedom of pastors to endorse candidates! Not a word about how the Christian nation needs a revival! No diatribe against the horrors wrought by secularism! In a way, it was refreshing to see a candidate be frank about his doubts about his faith. (As Ed Kilgore has pointed out, doubt as an element of religious belief is not favored by conservatives.) Kudos, I guess, to Paul, for his honesty about that. But that begs t…

Catholics Talk About Sex

By Kate Ott

…ing for a place to give birth, ’tis the season for Roman Catholics to talk about sexuality and sexual health education. As someone who spends much of my time talking about sexuality and sexual ethics with young adults on college campuses, what better place to start than Roman Catholic Universities? This month, I was contacted by Boston College students who lead sexual health and education initiatives. They are frustrated by their institution’s cli…

Inspired by the Anti-Abortion Movement and QAnon, Anti-Trans Rhetoric is a Blatant Call for Violence

By Annika Brockschmidt & Thomas Lecaque

…olent, And It’s Coming For Your Children.” The piece pushes misinformation about trans medical care and false and inflammatory narratives about the “mutilation” of children, all the while trying to convince its readers that all of this is the result of a secretive trans conspiracy: “(…) the people and institutions behind this movement are not fringe, they are not the pink-haired youths and black-clad Antifa thugs screaming at old ladies in the str…

Before Black Twitter: How the Early Black Press Shaped American Discourse Around Race and Religion

By Benjamin P. Fagan

…left to do on the black press. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? Outside of a small group of specialists in early African-American print culture, most people that I’ve talked to about my subject are surprised to learn that black women and men had a press of their own before the Civil War. So the biggest misconception about my topic may very well be that my topic doesn’t exist. And even when antebellum black newspapers h…

Aasif Mandvi on Islamophobia, Acting, and the Long Shadow of Jon Stewart

By Haroon Moghul

…f that prejudice, the misinformation that gets put out there. You can talk about and think about Muslims as you want, but you can’t stop Muslims from building a mosque. You can hate Muslims from the comfort of your house, or publicly, but when that becomes stopping Muslims from building a mosque, or worshipping, then we are crossing the line into something else. How do you feel Hollywood deals with diversity—is it getting better, or is it getting…

Can You Make a Comedy About UFO Cult Mass Suicide?

By Joseph Laycock

…perceived them as crazy. This research led Jones to conclude that a comedy about Heaven’s Gate might not be as inappropriate as it sounds. “I could never make a comedy about David Koresh or Jim Jones,” he explained, “But the Heaven’s Gate members were a bunch of intellectual people who made a conscious decision. And they appeared cheerful about what they were doing. I think the surviving members would love [The Away Team] if they saw it because it…

Reality as Revelation: “Hail Caesar!” is the Coen Brothers’ Most Religious Movie Yet

By Elijah Siegler

…creasingly impressive body of work actually be saying something consistent about the sacred, about morality and mythology? Hail, Caesar! leaves no room for doubt. Another reason most critics miss underlying religious themes: Hail, Caesar! is a comedy. Here we see the unacknowledged Protestant influence on modern ideas about religion: sincerity and seriousness are defining features of “real” religiosity—playfulness and humor may be used to mock rel…