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This weekend a plane flew over Coney Island and the Rockaways towing a banner with a swastika and an ad for proswastika.org, a new initiative by the Raelians—a religious movement that believes humans…

The Raelians, who regard the Catholic Church as their sexually repressive nemesis, say they’ve launched Clitoraid to help the victims of female circumcision.

What would Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark think of public school Bible courses that taught that Jewish festivals are actually typological predictions of Jesus, that the “African races” are descendants of Noah’s cursed son Ham, that biblical stories about angels may have referred to extraterrestrial visitors, or that Genesis’ six-day creation story is scientifically accurate if interpreted correctly?

Still wrangling over the property.

Religionists can quickly rattle off myriad global, historical sites of contested holy space. But there is still something deeply nauseating, unhomed, un-everything, about attacks on vulnerable human beings at prayer, or about to pray. We want to believe in religious spaces as safe dwellings, as sanctuaries in the most literal sense of the word—but they have also long been targets for Americans who fear change.

What ought we do about millennial thinking in our day? If the combined 1300 pages of these two books have taught me anything, it’s that we can’t make it just go away. There is something fascinating, and perverse, in the human psyche that seems to yearn for this world to be other than how it is, even if that means destroying it.

What do Pope Benedict XVI and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain have in common? They both have a thing for Krampus.

Mary Magdalene has been the object of endless projection, one fantasy after another luridly tattooed on the screen of her flesh. That some of these projections are in fact feminist projections only confirms her status as a saint for our times. Mary of Magdala is Mary of Irony, too.

The paranoid few who seem genuinely disturbed by the possibility of the coming end of the world may be responding the most reasonably to current events. Or not. This ambiguity is at the heart of Jeff Nichols’ recent film Take Shelter. The film explores whether its protagonist is crazy, or a prophet, or both.

NASA has identified its first Earth-like habitable world, which calls into question how special we are.