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‘Imagine Better’: Can Harry Potter Change the World?

By B. Howell Belser

…in Darfur. Since then, other campaigns have been dictated by the US political calendar. These include Wrock 4 Equality in October 2009, where the HPA campaigned for LGBT rights in Maine. Still other campaigns are driven by current events. The biggest of these to date was the Helping Haiti Heal campaign, during which the HPA along with other fan groups, raised $123,000 in just two weeks for medical supplies for their NGO partner, Partners In Healt…

Leper Messiah: A Jesus Freak’s Search for the Meaning of Bowie—A Critical Novella

By Mark Dery

…his gore-nographic fantasy of gobbling up a “giant rotten glob” of Elvis’s carcass in order to ingest the King’s magical powers: “I don’t need to go get The Golden Bough just to prove to everybody else what I already know because it’s simple horse sense, which is if I eat a little bit of Elvis (the host, as it were, or is that mixing mythologic metaphors?), then I take on certain qualities possessed by Elvis when he was alive…”5 As Bangs’s invocat…

Is Twitter Doing Enough to Remove Extremist Content? An Ex-Employee Weighs In

By Sofi Hersher

…as there is no definition of ‘religion,’ ‘culture,’ ‘terrorism,’ etc.) how can we address these questions systematically but with an eye towards the precedent we are setting for the future? We are living in the new world of proactive counter-terrorism programs. In the U.S., for example, there is create and capture, an NYPD program that sent undercover informants to report on the behavior of Muslims attending mosques, study groups, and community ev…

“Can You Tell Me Who The Villains Are?”: Rock and Religion, Irish-Style

By Lisa Bitel

…e Saw Doctors were not the only bunch to take the piss out of the hypocritical Bishop Casey. Christy Moore, the famously political folk singer, did his bit with a cover of Martin Egan’s song, “Casey”. But everybody was used to Christy’s whingeing about politics. The Saw Doctors, with foresight formerly reserved for prophets and druids, captured public reaction with the upbeat “Howya Julia”, skewering episcopal hypocrisy and clerical cover-ups. In…

Mormonism’s “9/11 Mosque Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…flood-ravaged Pakistan, which is 98% Muslim. To make matters worse, a local Southern California LDS Church representative who had pledged to join seventy other religious leaders at Friday’s interfaith press conference against Islamaphobia failed to show. Certainly we can do better. Whatever one thinks of the Park51 Islamic community center (and the project is not without problems, as my RD colleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-r…

Mike Johnson isn’t Just Your Average Christian Right Avatar — He’s Influenced by Fringe Movements Unfamiliar to Most Political Analysts

By Annika Brockschmidt

…et of his motivation as a crusader in the name of God throughout his political career. When he ran for Congress in 2016, he told a local Baptist newspaper: “Some people are called to pastoral ministry and others to music ministry, etc. I was called to legal ministry and I’ve been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage, an…

Single, But Married To Jesus

By Anthea Butler

…“The Pastor” will emerge when the doors of the church open. Despite my sarcasm, I can tell you that this is the story in many a black church on Sunday morning. So before Steve Harvey and any of that jackleg, scripture-spouting, church-hoppin’, marriage-worshipping crowd starts to talk about how I am a hater, please, please tell me how getting a husband is going to change this horrific situation for millions of black women in this country. As for…

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…what’s going on, but too few seem capable of saying it. We now have a fair number of political and civic leaders who are willing to say the word trauma and talk about the all-pervasive violence in this culture, not to mention the extent of mental disturbance and the fact that American civilians have more assault rifles in their possession than does the U.S. military. All well and good. But we have too few leaders who will talk about the deeper roo…

Does Religion Condemn Homosexuality?

By Michael Bronski

…the lives of its practitioners changes across historical periods, geographical locations, and in relation to other social forces. We can see this clearly in the case of Hinduism’s complex and changing attitudes toward homosexuality. Same-sex attachments and desire were both known and generally tolerated in ancient and medieval India, as reflected in such sacred texts as the Kama Sutra and Krittivasa Ramayana. It was not until India came under Brit…

Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…week, LGBT Weekly published a wrap-up of the state of LGBT equality in Africa. Vatican: Conference on ‘Complementarity’ Draws Raves from Anti-Gay Religious Right The Vatican-hosted interfaith conference on the “complementarity” of men and women in marriage took place this week. It was organized by conservative German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It drew a number of high-profile participants an…