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The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

By Kaya Oakes

…d girls who swayed through those parking lots asking for change, and the “mamas” and “old ladies” minding the camp stove while 60-something-year-old Deadhead guys hit on my teenage friends by offering them tickets to shows. Deadheads were anathema to my chosen subculture of socially conscious punks. East Bay punks were aggro and in your face about social justice, feminism, human rights; Deadheads, in our eyes, were too stoned and obsessed with the…

More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…. The website Erasing 76 Crimes published a new map of countries with laws against homosexual activity, which includes four fewer countries than it did at the beginning of last year. Responsible for the decline from 82 to 78 are Mozambique, which dropped its anti-gay law as part of a Penal Code overhaul last year; Palau, which decriminalized homosexuality last year; the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus; and São Tomé and Príncipe, which had actu…

Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…y that Des Moines was a Christian city, thank you very much and don’t call again. Someone apparently got through on the second try.) The potbellied MC crosses the stage in that wide-legged stride that identifies him as an ex-jock, a guy who crushed the quarterback for the pure joy of it. Back at the podium, he tells us that many were confused when the American Atheists chose Des Moines as the national convention site. “Why Des Moines?” people kep…

‘Have a Blessed Day’ May Not Be a Sign of Christian Nationalism, But it’s Not Innocuous Either

By Chrissy Stroop

…in America today? If a flight attendant had dismissed passengers with “salaam aleikum” rather than “have a blessed day,” we’d be having a very different discussion now—one most likely involving threats of Islamophobic violence and perhaps violence itself, as well as severe backlash against the airline. Christians, in other words, retain a highly privileged place in the American social hierarchy, and it seems to be that our best option for achievi…

Religion and Reality TV: Is God Watching?

By Kent L. Brintnall

…I much prefer films with explosions and high body counts over those with character development and subtitles. Reality television just never grabbed me. Oh sure, like everyone else I followed the trials and tribulations of Richard Hatch (the openly gay, nudist, tax-evading winner of Survivor’s first season), but I never actually watched the show. Due to an unplanned encounter with the glorious mysteries of the genre, however, I am now a serious add…

God Makes an Independent Film

By Eric Zassenhaus

…ectations of film audiences everywhere. For the initial funding, Gazowsky manages to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from churchgoers and anonymous donors, with the promise of millions more to come from a mysterious donor in Germany. Their task: to produce a visionary film for the spectator on high—as Gazowsky constantly reminds us—“an audience of One.” And so the members of Christian WYSIWYG Productions set off, a ragtag troupe of family m…

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men “Stand Up” for “Religious Freedom”… On a Plane

By Kara Loewentheil

…lly in the person’s own best interests: you offer to pay your seatmate to vacate, or you claim that contraception is harmful to women. Third, if none of that works, you create costs for both the authority attempting to regulate you and the innocent bystanders around you in the hopes that if you create enough problems the authority in question will cede way (in other words you block the aisles for a 10 hour flight, or you file lawsuits and cost the…

An Architect Reimagines the Synagogue as Ark, Shelter, Floating Fortress

By Kathryn Joyce

…to synagogue architecture is the basis for a new exhibit of his work, “Idea About Synagogue,” based on series of plans for synagogues inspired by the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, closing on April 9 at NYIT. The idea sprang, somewhat improbably, from his early teaching years at the University of Kentucky in the late ’70s, when a student (“maybe one of the other 15 Jewish guys in Kentucky at the time,” Friedman says) asked him why there was n…

What’s More Frightening Than Snakes on a Plane?

By Devin Kuhn-Choi

…using to sit in their assigned seats next to women, indicate. Here on RD, Kara Loewentheil recently argued that the airplane demonstration but that it “replicates the broader social and political movement strategies we’ve seen on a personal scale,” and highlighted the similarities between these smaller-scale protests and religious employers protesting the Affordable Care Act under claims of religious freedom. While I agree with Loewentheil’s point…

Can’t Get Away

By Kim Bobo

Two weeks ago my family headed off to our abbreviated summer vacation, cut short by high school orientations and soccer tryouts. My twin teenage sons were looking for adventure. As the director of Interfaith Worker Justice, a national faith-based organization addressing problems faced by workers in low- wage jobs, I was looking to get away from workplace problems. Unfortunately, it was not to be. First we took a cab to O’Hare, driven by an immigr…