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Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

By Jason Josephson Storm

…d spirits? The issue becomes even more troubling when you realize that the canonical European theorists (anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and so on) who came up with the various accounts of modernity as disenchantment lived in the nineteenth century in the midst of spiritualist and occult revivals. Magic and séances were on the surface of European culture at the very moment that Europeans came to argue that magic had vanished. So I bega…

Transgender and Christian: Finding Identity

By Jori Lewis

…r female); someone who is just taking hormones but not undergoing any surgical modifications; or someone who is undergoing or will undergo full sex reassignment surgery, including genital modification. Such differences vary according to socioeconomic status, age, and cultural context, but, in general, transgender people are sprinkled across every color and creed. Transgender people, though, are much less likely to take part in an organized religio…

Blood and Politics — Christian White Nationalism in the Age of Obama

By Bill Berkowitz

…s a White Christian republic rather than a multiracial democracy. And in a number of cases they turn their conviction that White Christians have superior civil and political rights—over those they deem “Fourteenth Amendment” citizens (everybody else)—into fraudulent schemes with fake money. In other instances, they establish “Christian” courts and militia groups that act as if they are legitimate arms of “lawful” government. In this belief system,…

Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…mblazoned in our cultural consciousness. On November 18, 1978, the largest number of American civilian lives was lost due to a single non-natural disaster—a sad distinction Jonestown would hold until September 11, 2001. In Stories from Jonestown, the most recent addition to the Jonestown library, Leigh Fondakowski has compiled the numerous interviews that she conducted in order to write her play, The People’s Temple, which ran at the Berkeley Rep…

Growing Up Cult: A Memoir of Life with Sri Chinmoy

By Brittany Shoot

…t surprised by it. I would be so interested to hear their true reaction to Cartwheels in a Sari because if they read it, they would see that the book explores the complicated realities that encompassed Sri Chinmoy and his mission. What is your spiritual life like today? I officially do not have a ‘spiritual life.’ In fact, even the word ‘spiritual’ is one that I cannot separate from my life with Sri Chinmoy. I am happily living a secular life. I d…

Dispatches From the Rhodian Shore: A (Tough) Love Letter to Religious Studies

By Todd LeVasseur

…ety moving forward, including how humans produce religion and thus how we academically study, research, and teach about it. They’re also data points published in just the last two months, bridging 2020 into 2021. Trends suggest future data points will only be more alarming and more severe, but we’ll get to that. 1. 2020 is tied with 2016 as the warmest year in recorded history. Sadly, if warming trends triggered by human addiction to fossil fuels…

New Mormon Anti-Gay Policy Sparks Mass Exodus From Church; Christian AID Workers in Africa Refuse to Help Gay Refugees; Ukraine Rejects, Then Accepts EU-Required Gay Rights Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nitiative coalition were among Egyptian and international human rights advocates who called for the release of journalist and human rights defender Hossam Bahgat after he was detained on Sunday by the military police. He was interrogated and charged with publishing false information in regard to a story he wrote about the secret military trial of officers who had allegedly been plotting a coup. He was released on Tuesday, according to the New York…

My Womb for His Purposes: The Perils of Unassisted Childbirth in the Quiverfull Movement

By Kathryn Joyce

…ian Scientists—or the recent case involving the Nemenhah Band—refusing medical care for their children. Chmielewski’s husband, who critics charge has erased or hidden much of his wife’s past writing, described her survival as a miracle of God, who spared her even as He took their son. Where Quiverfull Meets New Age The tragedy in the Chmielewski family also prompted other discussion of the role that unassisted childbirth has within the Quiverfull…

Is Obama the Antichrist? Why Armageddon Stands Between the President and the Evangelical Vote

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…pture. If evangelicals vanish, the rest of us might finally get better medical care, a healthier environment, a more just international community, and full civil rights for gays and lesbians. But short of this miracle, we can at least begin to understand that before Obama is able to penetrate the evangelical heart, evangelicals themselves will need to do some serious soul-searching. Rick Warren and Joel Osteen’s shallow, positive-thinking, feel-go…

Exclusive: Christian Right Bill Mill, Project Blitz, Hasn’t Gone Away, It’s Just Gotten More Secretive

By Frederick Clarkson

…e program and are invited to be there with the children. Some of the worst caricatures of these events are just that. Caricatures.” If the bill became law anywhere, it may not just be Drag Queen Story Hour that would get censored. Libraries may not, she says, “be able to do Pride Month displays and given some of the rhetoric that we are seeing these days, they also might not even be able to mount Black History Month displays.” Eleven national orga…