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Can You Make a Comedy About UFO Cult Mass Suicide?

By Joseph Laycock

…ia claimed that this was intergalactic “bus fare” for admittance onto the spaceship. But Jones was told the money was actually a sort of inside joke. Before 1997 Heaven’s Gate members had spent decades travelling and living “off the grid.” They had run afoul of local laws claiming that anyone without at least five dollars could be defined as a vagrant. So members always carried five dollars and money for a phone call. Benjamin Zeller, author of He…

The Sacred and the Dead: Ten Writers on the End of an American Adventure

By The Editors

…Jim Burklo The Dead sang, plucked, and pounded inexorably onward toward a palpably approaching ecstasy with no knowable when, where, or how… #7 : I Love You More Than Words Can Tell by David Vanderveen It takes humility to admit that we don’t have the answers, that our models aren’t truth itself and that the palaces we build to the religions we’re born into are failed, broken and must be burned. #8 : Deadheads Are Not a Deviant Subculture by Debo…

Terror In South Carolina

By Sarah Posner

…euters reports, the suspected shooter’s Facebook profile shows him wearing patches of the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia and sitting on a car with a license plate bearing the words “Confederate States of America.” He reportedly said, after sitting for an hour next to Pinckney and other worshippers at Emanuel, and after shooting them, and after a worshipper attempted to talk him out of reloading his gun, “I have to do it. You rape…

The Glorious, Ethnically-Challenged, Sisterhood of Spy

By Haroon Moghul

…Why are Pakistanis so good-looking? God knows! Why don’t European police departments seem more prepared for the numerous car chases we bring to their urban cores? ECB policy! Most heretically: Can you be friends with our nemeses? Uh-oh. Spy is much more than irreverent slapstick flick; it’s edgy in its honesty, valuing sororal loyalty to the point of political infidelity. In an age when there is no higher value than being open-minded, comedy might…

Dear Lindsay Lohan, I’m Sorry

By Haroon Moghul

…at, and I apologize for being part of such a mean gesture. In fact I had a phone conversation with a prominent American imam last night—in Islam, we say subhanallah at such coincidences—and he mentioned in passing how offended many white American Muslims were by this very kind of gesture. On reflection, I can see why. I don’t find racial insensitivity humorous directed at me. The least I can do is not support it. And the least I can do is the leas…

Does the Science Show that Spirituality Will Benefit Your Child?

By Michael Schulson

…n spiritual and religious life that the spiritual life, that the spiritual path, is also the path of thriving and flourishing and healing. I don’t think it diminishes it. I don’t think it’s sacrosanct. I think it’s testimony. How can parents balance the desire to have critical, questioning kids with a wish to encourage thinking that may not be entirely rational, or that may involve perceptions of entities that can’t be materially explained? We hav…

Facebook: Internet Highway to Hell

By Anthea Butler

…become the latest “sinful” activity. Perhaps Rev. Miller should get on the phone to Sarah Palin, and counsel her about her kids’ activity on Facebook. Bristol Palin found time from her “Dancing with the stars” practice to get on Facebook with her sister Willow to ride on a friend who had the chutzpah to say “Sarah Palin’s Alaska is failing so hard right now.” Willow’s response was to call the poster a gay slur, and Bristol jumping in the fray to r…

Pornography’s Dirty Little Secret: What We Say vs. What We Do

By Shira Tarrant

…gh rates of conservatism and the volume of US Internet porn searches. This paradox may result from preoccupation with sexual content, presumably because of the taboo. It may also be the case that high rates of online sexual activity come from liberals who live in these sexually restrictive right-leaning states. In any case, the rhetoric and reality gaps when it comes to religion and porn use easily confuses the issues and leaves people at odds in…

Meeting on the Bridge: Fr. James Martin’s Ministry to LGBT Catholics Becomes a Book

By Kaya Oakes

…f authority, so as not to mistake what your local parish priest says for a papal encyclical. Bishops are going to read this book too, and they’re going to want to know that the LGBT community can interact with them in a respectful way as well. But the basic answer is that those virtues are Christian virtues. One of the things that always comes to mind is Martin Luther King, and the way he counseled people who were facing persecution. And I think o…

Can Faith-Based Organizing for Gun Control Work?

By Sarah Posner

…equipped with sidewalk chalk, which they’d use to draw a big heart on the pavement at the parking lot entrance, emblazoned with the words, “God loves you.” These words are designed to stop you from doing something you’ll regret. The activists would focus not on the customer’s sin—no one wants to hear about their own sinfulness—but on that of the people inside the gun shop and gun show: how they look the other way at straw men purchases, how they’…