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Death Couture: Not For Halloween Only

By Stephen Andes

…gh the agency of her narco-devotees. Local Religion, Globalization, and La Santa Muerte Although the origins of La Santa Muerte developed locally and unrelated to criminality, there is no doubt that the devotion is changing. Like language, symbols as objects of devotion are constantly in flux. Images that once helped to ease the fear of death have now come to embody that fear on both sides of the border. As savvy marketers, drug cartels have appro…

Did the Church Create or Co-Opt Human Rights?

By Austin Dacey

…f the South African delegation, Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts. It was an American delegate to the San Francisco conference, Barnard College dean Virginia Gildersleeve, who modified Smuts’ text and thereby “singlehandedly [introduced] the allusion to “the dignity and worth of the human person,” Moyn writes. Actually, as Moyn himself blogged after visiting the Gildersleeve papers at Columbia, the New Zealand delegation may have been the first to sugg…

Sit Down and Shut Up: Pulling Mindfulness Up By Its (Buddhist) Roots

By Max Zahn

…nt to keep in mind that this conversation is unfolding within a divided American Buddhist community. Specific numbers are hard to pin down, and estimates vary widely, but roughly three-quarters of American Buddhists are Asian. The remainder are predominantly white converts. Practitioners in the Asian diaspora typically join communities that are aligned with sects popular in their origin countries. Convert Buddhists, on the other hand, tend to cong…

News Flash: God Has Revised the Laws of Physics

By Paul Wallace

…. Say I stomp my foot in Atlanta and you stomp yours a short time later in San Francisco. Some observers will detect my stomp first, and some will detect your stomp first. Neither is wrong, because for such pairs of events there is no “real” order. This is not a matter of mere appearances or light travel times or time zones, but is part of the way the universe is put together. In general, the ordering of events is relative. As Dave Barry says, I a…

God TV: Televangelism 2.0

By Sarah Posner

…debauchery to Christ when she was a teenage rock rebel in Durban, South Africa. (Rory is South African; Wendy was born in the U.K. but also raised in South Africa.) First introduced to Christianity at a Billy Graham Crusade, Wendy claims to have come face to face with Jesus while performing with her rock band at a Durban night club. “A few days after her Damascus Road conversion,” reads her biography on the web site for her book, Journal of the U…

How Evangelicals Pick Presidents

By Sarah Posner

…” Robison then introduced Bush to other evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal leaders in a series of meetings, where pastors laid hands on him and concluded that “it was obvious that this man’s heart gravitates toward the things of the Lord.” Hagee, for his part, later wrote a book endorsing Bush over Al Gore, titled God’s Candidate for America. Two of the three reported Perry supporters, Barton and Hagee, are fellow Texans and have long ties…

Firing a Woman for Her Choice of Husband

By Kate Childs Graham

…ol teacher, was fired from her position at Central Catholic High School in San Antonio, Texas. The reason? Well, on November 22, LaFortune married Benjamin Stakes—a divorcé. The status of LaFortune’s husband-to-be was revealed in a school newspaper featuring the couple’s upcoming nuptials. According to Catholic doctrine, marriage must be between an unmarried man and unmarried woman. Citing this doctrine, Deacon Patrick Cunningham of Central Cathol…

Its the Spiritual Economy, Stupid: Why the Gay Marriage Fracas Isn’t About Either

By Nick Street

…esbians and gay men are allowed to tie the knot on the courthouse steps in San Francisco. The real issues are the authority of the Bible and the nature of revelation. Recent polls show that while roughly two-thirds of Americans believe that Noah’s flood, the creation story and other biblical events are literally true, only about 40 percent of those surveyed accept the Bible as completely inerrant—a figure declining at about the rate that public ac…

To Let It Go and So To Find A Way: U2, (A)Live with Grief and Grace

By Cathleen Falsani

…mnist) with Bono in 2002 on his humanitarian bus trip (DATA’s “Heart of America” tour) across the American Midwest urging evangelical Christians (and others) to respond to the then-pandemic of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. We’ve had many conversations, publicly and privately, over the years about our shared Christian faith. From their earliest days as a band, U2 has sung about wrestling with angels, the magnificent and mystical, God the Father, the…

It Gets Better: Gay Mormons Hold Conference in DC

By Joanna Brooks

…headlines last year after having been called to a leadership position in a San Francisco LDS congregation. They’ll gather as local Mormon conservative activists in Maryland also organize this weekend—acting individually and without involvement from LDS Church headquarters—gathering signatures in support of a ballot initiative to overturn a recently-passed marriage equality law. But for this group of pioneering LGBT Mormons a key focus rather than…