Rapture Coming, Mark Your Calendars
A friend snapped this photo on the way to work in Colorado Springs. Apparently, these pictures have been popping up…
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Gun Ownership: ‘An Obligation to God’
Film Follows Teen Exiles from Polygamous Sect
Many first learned of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints when the polygamous group came into the media spotlight following leader Warren Jeffs’ arrest (and eventual conviction) as an accomplice to rape. Pictures of young women in “prairie dresses” were splashed on TV and the media rushed to try to explain who these people actually were. Were they Mormons? Were they a cult? Sons of Perdition, a documentary that premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival, follows the story of a group of teenage boys who have left the FLDS church, and tracks their struggles in exile from their homes and families.
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Kill Your Patriarchs: An Interview with Michael Muhammad Knight
His first book, The Taqwacores, was xeroxed and spiral-bound, but it struck a loud punk-inflected chord in a community of mostly-Islamic youth, trying to reconcile music and religion.
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Kenneth Starr in the “Athens of Texas”
Well-known for his dogged “pursuit of knowledge” when it came to Bill Ciinton’s sex life, Kenneth Starr will now be at the helm of the the largest Baptist university in the world.
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Taqwacore Roundtable: On Punks, the Media, and the Meaning of “Muslim”
What do you get when you add taqwa, or God-consciousness, to the punk suffix “-core”? Can something be Islamic without being religious? As journalists try to get a handle on this genre- and culture-bending mashup, RD associate editor Hussein Rashid gets right to the source.
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‘Culting’: From Waco to Fundamentalist Mormons
When the media labels a religious group a “cult,” it fans the flames of intolerance and can endanger the group’s most vulnerable members.
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Dreaming Cyborg Dreams: Virtual Identity and Religious Experience
The fantasy realms of online gaming become even more surreal when religion enters the scene; imagine Batman going on pilgrimage to Mecca, or a virtual crucifixion, or massive Bibles, raining from the sky.
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