UFOs

Culture

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

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If there is any communal rite of passage at Burning Man, it is the Temple Burn on Sunday night, the event’s finale. Not everyone comes out for this event; some would rather dance to techno music or chat up a neighbor on the next bar stool instead of joining tens of thousands of Burners sitting on the ground quietly waiting for the temple to burn down, taking all their messages and their pain—they hope—with it.

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Books, Culture

How We Got to Super: Grant Morrison’s Visionary Gnosticism

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The book is at once a rich, humorous history of comics, a political commentary on the absurdities of conservative British and American culture, and a deeply personal memoir. The relevant moments for us here involve those in a Kathmandu hotel room just after the writer had visited a Tantric Buddhist temple. As Morrison chills on the roof of the Vajra Hotel, he sees the temple come alive and begin to rear up like one of those living sports cars in the Transformers movies…

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Culture

Updated: 5 Lessons Learned from the Apocalypse Fail, Or, It’s Not the End of the World as We Know It, and I Feel So-So

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And so the world still turns. No rapture, no living hell, no Armageddon. We are where we were before the weekend with no signs of Christ’s return, facing the same ol’ same ol’: Arnold’s love child, Newt’s flame-out, life without Oprah. Perhaps this might be a nice teachable moment to reflect on all this—not nonsense at all, but rather an illuminating cultural moment that reveals an awful lot about the role of religion in our crazy world. What are the key takeaways from the “mediapocalypse”? Here are five for your consideration:

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