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Adobe sentenced Flash to mobile death row earlier this summer, announcing their plans to pull Flash from the Google Play store on Aug. 15. On Aug. 15, they pulled the plugin, making users unable to update or install Adobe Flash on their Android device.

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Android devices that already had Adobe Flash player installed will still be able to use the plugin. In a blog update yesterday, Adobe recommended uninstalling Flash Player on all devices upgraded to Android 4.1:

If a device is upgraded from Android 4.0 to Android 4.1, the current version of Flash Player may exhibit unpredictable behavior, as it is not certified for use with Android 4.1. Future updates to Flash Player will not work. We recommend uninstalling Flash Player on devices which have been upgraded to Android 4.1.

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Sean Austin said, “My family was extremely disappointed when I told them I don’t believe in God.”

Sean Austin said his family’s relationship changed when he told them he did not believe in God.

Austin told his family last Christmas, two years after he stopped believing in God. “They were extremely disappointed,” Austin said, who described his family as very religious. “All through Christmas Eve, Christmas day … the entire break we were having arguments constantly.”

“They were disappointed that I had given up faith so easily,” Austin said. “They assumed I was being weak. They thought they had raised me wrong.”

Austin is a junior at DePaul University where he is a member of the DePaul Alliance for Freethought, a group for students who do not believe in or question God’s existence. Austin said he had never met another black atheist before he came to college.

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Austin is a minority of a minority, one of the growing number of African-Americans to profess their disbelief in God.

“My father blamed himself for not taking us to the Baptist church where I had been baptized,” Austin said. “My mom was afraid to tell other relatives in case they thought differently of me.”

“The most upsetting thing was that they told me to pretend to have faith, that even if you are Jewish or Muslim, you can have some moral compass. But they assumed I don’t have a moral compass,” he paused and said, “just because I don’t have a book telling me what to do.”

“It really hurt me,” Austin said. “It was bad enough that they didn’t accept me for what I was, but then they wanted me to live a lie. They weren’t willing to accept that I was my own person with my own ideas and thoughts.”

Atheists are the most hated minority in America, making it even more so difficult for this minority within a minority. Former U.S. President George Bush once said, “I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”

“My parents asked me, ‘how are you going to live your life?’ and I said ‘scientific logic and evidence,’” Austin said. “They tried to convince me that people don’t know how the universe came about, that you can’t trust science,” Austin said.

Austin said he has tried to offer his parents “different points of view” as a way to open dialogue. “I try showing them Buddhist or Jewish readings but they don’t want to hear it,” he said. “It’s really a one-sided discussion.”

African-Americans are the most religious racial and ethnic group in the nation. According to PRC, 87 percent of African-Americans say they belong to a religious group. According to the 2008 study, eight-in-ten African-Americans say religion is very important in their lives, compared with 56 percent among the overall public. Nearly ten African-Americans say they are absolutely certain that God exists.

“Everything happens at church, so to step away from the church is basically like stepping away from the African-American community; it’s like stepping away from our American heritage,” Austin said. “The church is always the staple of every African-American community; it’s a cultural icon, it’s like our Mecca,” Austin said.

Last February, advertisements reading “Doubt’s about religion? You’re one of many,” were posted across Chicago and other select U.S. cities that featured a historical skeptic and a modern-day freethinker.

Debbie Goddard, said “For many people that are calling religion into question their race seems to be called into question,” said Debbie Goddard, director of African-Americans for Humanism (AAH), the group responsible for the signs. “So our campaign says, ‘here are people who were nonreligious or had doubts’,” she said. “It says, ‘you are not alone,’ in other words, ‘you are one of many out there’.”

AAH strategically markets their advertisements to the young, black community because, according to Goddard, “white attracts white.” The advertisements’ precise location varies by city, depending on the region’s transportation of choice.

“Many will say ‘I’ve never met another black atheist out there’,” Goddard said.

Miciaah “Isaiah” Handy said he only has one friend that is comfortable with him not believing in God. Handy has never met another black atheist.

“There are probably quite a few number of African-Americans who are atheists but they probably stay in the closet because they don’t want to be ostracized,” Handy said.

Last November a PRC survey found that 53 percent of Americans say it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. Former U.S. President George Bush once said, “I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”

According to a 2011 Gallup poll, 49 percent of Americans would refuse to support an atheist for president, compared to the 32 percent said they would not support a gay or lesbian candidate.

Last January, the Black Nonbelievers of Chicago formed for people questioning their faith. The group has gained more than 60 members, whose ages range from 19 to late-60s.

“Sometimes it is a little harder for us to come out as non-believers,” said Kimberly Veal, the group’s executive director. “We provide support, encouragement and motivation.”

Kimberly Veal (right), the executive director of the Black Nonbelievers of Chicago, appeared in a February advertisement for the African Americans for Humanism group.

“It’s totally harder being in a minority community, especially the black community, because religion is one of the cornerstone foundation of our community,” Veal said. “Five years ago, it would have been hard to find a minority who professed their atheism or their secular views,” she said. “However, it has grown exponentially over the past five years. According to some of our forecasts, it will continue to grow and you are going to see more minorities starting to express their non-beliefs and doubts.”

African-Americans seem to be the group discriminated the most for being non-religious, said Todd Stiefel, the founder of  the non-profit Stiefel Freethought Foundation (SFF), which donated $100,000 to the AAH’s campaign. “The black community can be really rough on someone that doesn’t have religious beliefs,” he added.

“I usually invest in ideas that will eliminate discrimination and help with the separation between church and state,” he said. Stiefel said SFF, which provides financial support to free-thought organizations, pitched the “We are AAH” campaign to the African-Americans for Humanism last year.

Despite the isolation many black non believers have felt from their religious families, atheists are increasingly coming out a younger age, which historically attracted only white men. According to a 2007 PRC survey, 20 percent of 18-25 year olds report no religious affiliation, up from 11 percent in the late 1980s.

Many of these black atheists attribute the Internet to the surge of atheists and agnostics. Blogs and forums such as Reddit enable people to safely express their beliefs without fear of repercussions. There are more than 600,000 “Godless Redditers” subscribed to /r/atheism, a subreddit, which breaks into more than 100 different branches, one of which being Black Atheism.

“The Internet was the best thing that ever could have happened,” Veal said. “The Internet has allowed us to grow. Because of the availability of information and knowledge and social media we can exchange information and share ideas,” she said.

“When I was young, I had questions that no one could answer,” Veal said. “As I grew up, I could find those answers. On the Internet you can find almost anything you want,” she added.

Jessica Kearney, 13, came out as an atheist one year ago and is an active /r/atheism commenter on Reddit. “My family is super religious. One time at a Thanksgiving dinner my Aunt Shirley decided to fight me over the snake theory. It was horrible and I have a problem when people try to take away the little freedom I do have at 13. I almost blew up.”

“I bit my tongue so hard it bled,” she said. “I couldn’t talk she just kept running over me and saying, ‘no, listen, ask Jesus to forgive you’ over and over until my grandma stopped her. I had to leave the room.”

Handy was 13 years old when he openly stepped away from his faith.

“My grandmother believed I was going to hell,” Handy said.

When Handy was asked how long he has been an atheist, without skipping a beat he said “five years, this April.” Coming to that realization was a cognitive process that had lasted for more than a year, he said.

Religious debates across the Internet pushed Handy away from God when he was 12 years old. “I just couldn’t morally agree with any of the religious arguments being made, especially on gay marriage.” “I was still Christian when I read it,” he said. “I didn’t really accept the idea that homosexuality was an abomination.” Handy said he began a path toward “theism,” or a “non-interaction towards God.”

Five years later, Handy is a complete atheist, as his non-interaction with God has evolved into a full-fledged disbelief.

“I just can’t worship a God that would send anyone to Hell just because they didn’t believe in him,” Handy said. “It didn’t really make sense to me … and that’s when I decided I was an atheist.”

“When I actually came out I was at summer camp. I was 13,” he said. “I told my cousin and you could see the little puppy dog look in his eyes and he said ‘you have to believe in God, you have to,” he said. “I get the feeling that me not believing in God was a letdown.”

To Handy, religion is part of “an assumed cultural identity” amongst blacks. “Christianity has been ingrained with African-American culture for so long that it is kind of hard to separate it,” he said.

“The thing with the black community is, the black community believes you are Christian and you believe in the Bible on some level. It’s almost a prerequisite for being black in some cases,” Handy said. “You can slide a little bit if you are Muslim or maybe Jewish, but any other … you are not getting any traction there.”

Although isolation runs rampant however, it does not define the minority within a minority experience.

Hensley Akiboh, 23, has not experienced isolation as an atheist. His mother was not raised in a religious home, but his father, born and raised in Nigeria, was. As long as Akiboh can remember, his father “would occasionally mention something religious, but hardly ever embraced it.”

“My sister and I were always encouraged to think for ourselves and I highly doubt my parents would judge us if we chose to follow any religion,” Akiboh wrote in an e-mail.

“I think religion can definitely play a beneficial role in the family dynamic,” he said, “but I can speak for myself when I say that similar family values are taught and learned in a home whether God is present or not.”

The intersection between hard-hitting American football and reverential fasting can be found during fall Friday nights on Ford Road in Dearborn, Michigan.

The majority of football players at Fordson High School did not eat from dawn to dusk. Faith and patriotism, hunger and thirst, stood at football’s equivalent of the half court line for the majority of Fordson HS football players during the final ten days of Ramadan.

In “Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football,” a documentary released last year, offers a glimpse into the lives of the predominately Arab-American community, however, these issues fall into the shadows. For these students, their main thought at the ball’s snap is conquering the crosstown rival player immediately on the other side of ball. These are the glory days, or rather, nights.

The film follows several high school football players on Dearborn’s east side as they do not eat or drink from dawn to dusk during the final ten days of Ramadan.

Director Rashid Ghazi did not portray the confluence of fasting and physical labor nor its congruence with the Sept. 11 attacks as the story’s centerfold. The story of the football game, a high school student’s senior year crosstown rival football game, is what pulls the viewer in.

“I thought we were going to get a film that was more depressive than what we ended up getting,” Ghazi said. “I thought we were going to get a film of the community that felt really sorry for themselves and down on their nation and down on their luck,” he said. “But what I found,” he said, “was a community that was extremely resilient and almost defiant to the point where it’s a ‘no excuses’ kind of place.” As a whole, they had a “you don’t have to feel sorry for us’” kind of mentality, he said.

Many of the football players are third or fourth generation Arabic descent,” Ghazi said. “A lot of things that they are passionate about are what your “typical American guy” is passionate about,” he said. What is not typical about these men is the color of their skin and their religion, Ghazi said.

Muslims were initially Ghazi’s secondary target audience, he said. Due to distribution issues, Ghazi said he has been putting more attention on the Muslim audience as a way to drive awareness of the film.

“My goal is to reach American males who may not necessarily be open to Islam, may have had negative images of Islam, may have bigotry against Islam,” he said.

The “American Dream” narrative was never intentional, Ghazi said. “It just came out of the voices of these people,” he said, “and to me, it was very inspiring.”

To Ghazi, this narrative made it apparent that Dearborn’s current immigrants have the same dream as America’s past settlers. “If you look at the first people who came to this country,” he said, “they came because of religious persecution. They came for more opportunity.”

When Henry Ford built the high school in 1922, nearly the entire school population was forged from children of European immigrants whose parents were the original laborers cranking steel and Model T’s out of Ford’s first factories. Since then the demographic has shifted and Arab-Americans make up the large majority of the student populace. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Arab Americans now make up 30 percent of Dearborn’s population, giving the city the densest Arab American population in the country. While the data for Dearborn’s 2010 Arab American population is not yet available, 2010 census data revealed that of the 18 cities bordering Detroit–which saw a 25 percent population drop from 2000 to 2010–Dearborn was the only city with a stable population during those same years.

“If you go out to Dearborn, it is amazing,” Ghazi said. “As you are driving down the street, you see Arab signs, and churches– Christian churches with Arabic signs.”

“It is a different culture there,” he said.

“I think [Muslims’] definition of the American Dream is whatever immigrants’ is … and that has been freedom,” he said. “It has been opportunity. It has been education.”

Ghazi said he believes that many Muslim’s “American Dream” is to own their business.

“When you look at the revitalization of Dearborn and you go down Michigan Avenue, the entire street is the American Dream for all the people because they all own their own businesses as well.”

Ghazi said it took six years for the film to come to fruition. According to Ghazi, after a hesitant Dearborn Board of Education agreed to allow him to film the movie, he signed a contract that forbade him from discussing any pending lawsuits surrounding the school.

As concepts with faithful followers, the integration of Ramadan with football season is the perfect storm for a compelling sports narrative. Ramadan, however, did not play a major role in the film.

“This was intentional,” Ghazi said. “They didn’t want to make a big deal about Ramadan because they thought it was something that you just do, not something that should be talked about that much,” he said.

According to Baquer Sayed, the team’s wide receiver, “Ramadan gives us a chance to step back and think about the poor and what they are going through.”

Since the documentary was filmed in 2009, Coach Fouad Zaban has moved the team’s practices to the middle of the night, which last from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. during weeks the religious and athletic calendars intersect, according to the New York Times.

Several critics inveighed against the flashes of flag-waving and theatrical music jammed at the end of the film.

This dramatization, however, was necessary in certain respects, Ghazi said.

“If you have got a pickup truck, and you have a Confederate flag and a tattoo … all of a sudden you are American,” he said. Symbols are important to many cultures.

For the film’s target audience already have a bias against Muslims and Islam, he said. “Some people may say it is ‘too much I love America’” with the culminated image of football, the American Dream, and “some flag waving,” Ghazi said, “but it is also a message that needs to be heard.”

“What your definition of an American is in your mind is not necessarily an American,” he said. “An American can be a lot of things.”

Fordson is scheduled to play Saturday, March 17 at 7 p.m. at the Michael D. Rose Theatre in Memphis Tennessee.

Hybels’ Sunday sermon originated 34 miles away at Willow Creek Community College’s main campus in South Barrington, Illinois, and was broadcast to Willow Creek’s six Illinois campuses on a projector.

After Chicago’s Sunday service, George Evans, 57, stood in the crowded lobby in a black leather jacket. “I joined the church a year and a half ago to get my life off the streets,” he said. “I wanted to stop smoking cigarettes, stop drinking alcohol … all that stuff. Whenever I have a problem, first I talk to God and then I talk to the pastor,” the South Side resident said.

Evan’s black leather jacket stood shoulders away from a man in a green cashmere sweater, Michael Atella, a 68-year-old psychologist from Streeterville.

Atella was one of the founding members of Willow Creek. “My wife and I had a prompting to leave the suburbs and move to the city,” he said.

After Atella and his wife moved here, they talked to many other small suburban churches that were branching to Chicago.

“We weren’t alone,” he said, “There is a moving in Chicago. God had a vision in Chicago. God’s love was wanting to draw us in and move to the area.”

“It started off pretty small and got big,” he said and turned to look at the crowded lobby. He paused. “Just look at us,” his said as he continued to look at the crowd. As a smile slowly spread across his face, he said, “I think God is doing some pretty amazing things. Catholics, Protestants, non-denominational, his love is touching us all.”

Shortly before his death, Vincent Van Gogh painted “Old Church Tower at Nuenen,” which in a letter to his sister he said reflected “how perfectly simple death & burial is, as simple as falling of autumn leaves — just some earth dug up — a little wooden cross.”

Atella told the story of the “Old Church Tower at Nuenen,” a painting Vincent Van Gogh created in his later years, and of its dark, morbid strokes that they were reminded of when planning Willow Creek, Atella said.

The painting reflected “how perfectly simple death & burial is, as simple as falling of autumn leaves — just some earth dug up — a little wooden cross,” Van Gogh wrote of the painting shortly before his death. “The fields around — they make a final line against the horizon, where the grass of the churchyard ends — like a horizon of sea. And now this ruin tells me how a creed and religion have moldered away, even though they were so well established — how, nevertheless, the life & death of the peasants is and remains the same: always sprouting and withering like the grass and the flowers that are growing in this graveyard.”

“We didn’t want the church to be anything like that,” Atella said. “We wanted a church as diverse as the community.” He looked back across the room at the crowd swarming with different races and cultures. “We really are a multicultural church. We could be better,” he admitted, “but that’s because diversity is a really hard thing to achieve.”

“This city has so many different people,” Atella said. “Chicago’s not only diverse, but we’re also a global city. People are constantly flying in and out from all over the world.”

The Chicago campus’ pastor, Jon Klinepeter, described Willow Creek’s Sunday service as “small talk” and said it is not meant to be intimate. “We have a Sunday service because of tradition,” he said.

Theaters are inexpensive and available Sunday mornings, Klinepeter said. Large, ornate, and Sunday availability are common denominators this dual-use theater shares with its European ancestors.

Spirituality is connected throughout the week with different events and meetings, Klinepeter said. “This is a church about grace and acceptance and love,” Klinepeter said. “And the pursuit of Jesus,” he added.

When speaking of Willow Creek’s diversity, both Klinepeter and Atella cited the same phrase, “The most segregated hour is Sunday.”

“A multicultural community is a constant evolution. Segregation is easier,” Klinepeter said. However, Klinepeter said this is not a problem for Willow Creek because multiculturalism is so heavily wrapped around their church.  “The people coming here value being out of their comfort zone,” he said. On any given Sunday you are going to have black gospel and white contemporary Christian music,” Klinepeter said.

“And our city is very segregated,” Klinepeter added. Knlinepeter drew on Chicago’s history of developing specific programs or services that pushed racial minorities into specific pockets of Chicago, such as redlining, which began in the 1930s after the New Deal’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation developed green and red color-coded maps illustrating the city’s racial and economic neighborhoods to use for categorizing lending and insurance risks.

In 1959, The U.S. Civil Rights Commission declared Chicago to be the nation’s most residentially segregated city in the country. According a report released last month by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research analyzing 2010 U.S. census data, although segregation has declined, Chicago is still the nation’s most segregated city.

“The loop is the only neighborhood in Chicago that is not segregated,” he said. “That’s why we bring our sermons here, to make ourselves accessible to the city.”

“We don’t want to be a church that wants to be a multicultural church but says, ‘leave your culture behind’,” he said. “We say, bring your history.”

Klinepeter is unique to many evangelical pastors in that he is divorced. According to Klinepeter, his marriage ended after his wife had an affair. Klinepeter said he believed that despite his loyalty to his wife during the marriage, most evangelical churches would never allow him to be pastor.

When Klinepeter delivers his sermons he said he always tells people, “I promise I’m the biggest sinner in the room.”

As pastor, Klinepeter said his only job is to follow Jesus. “My job is not to represent myself as the moral authority,” the pastor said. “I’m just a follower of Jesus.”

However, Evangelicals’ interpretation of the Bible condemns homosexuality, which causes Klinepeter’s devotion to the Bible and compassion for others to tangle in a cross of confusion. According to a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, 63 percent of evangelical Protestants say society should discourage homosexuality.

“In many ways, the gay community has more love than the evangelical community,” he said. Many problems tied to homosexuality are because “we don’t understand heterosexual problems,” he said.

Klinepeter jerked to his feet and with a sharpie clutched in his hands, drew a line across a piece of paper with the words “heterosexual” on one end and “homosexual” on the other. “Which is more evil?” he asked and without pausing, said more evil acts take place on the heterosexual end.

“So we are taking those verses and trying to see what this means.” He paused. “We can’t just throw out those verses.”

“But we will never be a church where they won’t be welcome,” he said. To Klinepeter, the term “evangelical” has become politicized, which he says strips it of its historical meaning that calls for an eternal devotion to Jesus Christ.

When evangelical leaders say they hate homosexuals or that gays are going to hell, Klinepeter said, “I feel profound sadness and anger.”

“If any person hates another person they should not say they know Jesus,” he said.

The name of the event, which is held across college campuses around the world, caused controversy across DePaul’s campus. More than fifty university members signed an open letter which claimed the events drew a “baseless parallel between Israel and South Africa” that was “not only inaccurate, but also, inexcusably offensive, as it minimizes the criminal suffering endured by those victims of the true apartheid.”

In the midst of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), SJP’s president, Jasmine Abdel-Razik defended their use of the word “apartheid” saying it was “the reality of the situation.” But then Abdel-Razik softened her opinion by expressing her wishes for peace amongst SJP and DePaul’s Israeli group.

Two days prior on SJP’s Facebook event page, a student asked why it was called “Israel Apartheid Week,” to which SJP responded, “It’s because the week is dedicated to exposing Israeli Apartheid.”

Abdel-Razik, who was not responsible for writing SJP’s response, said, “When I saw that question I didn’t know how to respond because I was like, ‘you know what, I kind of agree with you’”. Abdel-Razik said she wanted to make clear that despite her role as SJP president, her opinions were her own. “I just feel like the truth comes out so you don’t always need to expose it, you just need to advocate and live with what is happening,” she said.

“We aren’t even talking about politics anymore,” Abdel-Razik said. “It turns into very childish … there’s two different sides and we’re talking about how using the term ‘apartheid’ is offensive,” she stopped a moment before continuing, “the dialogue just hasn’t worked.”

Steven Resnicoff, a professor of law and a co-director of the College of Law’s Center for Jewish Law & Judaic Studies said, “When the students refer to ‘apartheid’ they don’t have any idea what it means or legally means.”

The Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court defines apartheid as “inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

“There is nothing wrong with difference of opinion in policies but people should be careful in the words they use, not just to slander people and create hatred,” said Resnicoff. “Why don’t they want to have an open dialogue without shutting people out and shutting people down,” Reisnicoff said.

Abdel-Razik said, “We want to be able to have an open dialogue. We want to be able to have an open face-to-face. “It’s not fun to be an organization and have an enemy on campus, and that isn’t a position anyone wants to be in,” Abdel-Razik said. “I don’t see what we’ve done wrong besides saying it like it is,” she paused and said, “I guess it’s a stubborn thing.”

“If you fight so many times to fight something you aren’t going to fix an issue,” she said. “Especially in Palestine, there is so much going on that you can’t really afford to attack the other side and especially being a student group, that’s not what we want.”

Abdel-Razik said SJP had many meetings prior to IAW to discuss whether or not they felt using the word “apartheid” was appropriate. However, she added, “But you know, it’s an international week and it’s power in numbers and it is exposing the other side.”

“Using the term ‘apartheid’ isn’t an attack on people with Jewish identity,” Abdel-Razik said. “It’s looking at the institution and identifying the different policies at the walls that are being built across the entire country,” she said. “It’s not just a security wall it’s people that are separating kids and people are having children at checkpoints. It’s not Hillel’s fault that this is happening,” she said.

“It’s offensive to anyone,” Leah Karchmer said. “It draws a baseless parallel to Africa.”

Karchmer, a freshman and a double major in peace, justice, and conflict studies, as well as religious studies, is the co-president of Israel Advocates, a political student organization formed in January to reach out to students that identify with Israel rather than Judaism and to separate politics and religion from Hillel, DePaul’s Jewish organization.

This article was originally published in The DePaulia in print and online.

Photo by Jason Pratt | Distributed and modified with courtesy of Creative Commons.

A federal appeals court ruled Jan. 3 that a cross displayed on public property in San Diego, California, is unconstitutional.

The Mt. Soledad memorial stood in a separation of church and state battlefield for decades and now only one battle remains.

Two Vietnam War veterans filed suit against the city thirteen years ago, saying the cross, erected on a parcel of public property known as Mount Soledad, violated the California Constitution’s “No Preference” clause. The clause specifies that it is illegal to display a religious symbol on public land.

The most recent case was related to one of two bills passed Jan. 24 by the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Duncan Hunter, whose 52^nd Congressional district is adjacent to Mount Soledad, introduced the “War Memorial Protection Act,” which calls for the inclusion of religious symbols on war memorials and serves as a response to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling on Jan. 24.

That same day, the House also passed the World War II Memorial Prayer Act, a bill calling for a plaque inscribed with the prayer Franklin D. Roosevelt said on D-Day morning to be placed at the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The Liberty Institute, which is representing the Mount Soledad Memorial Association overseeing the monument, is appealing the case to the Supreme Court.

Jeffrey Mateer, from the Liberty Institute who is arguing the case, said that based on the last couple of court decisions, he anticipates the Supreme Court will reverse the decision and hold that the memorial cross is unconstitutional.

The Liberty Institute also represents the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who are the caretakers of a cross that in 2010 in the case Salazar v. Buono, the Supreme Court allowed to remain in the Mojave Desert. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for a 5-4 majority and said, “The Constitution does not oblige government to avoid any public acknowledgment of religion’s role in society.”

The judge who wrote the opinion declaring the Mount Soledad case unconstitutional was the only judge who did not vote in favor of the Mojave Desert cross, Mateer said. “I hope the Supreme Court will fix this like they have in other cases,” he added.

“A cross evokes all of the crosses in Arlington Cemetary and Normandy,” Mateer said. “In the case of Mount Soledad, that’s the symbol the veterans in the 1950s chose to honor their following comrades. Those veterans fought and they chose that this symbol was what they wanted to be represented by.”

However, not everyone believes a cross is inclusive to all Americans.

“They should have a war memorial that represents all veterans, not just Christians,” said Bruce Gleason, head of city’s largest atheist group, Skeptics. “The U.S. government was founded on the basis of the majority not being in control over the minority,” Gleason said. “The tyranny of the majority should not control the minority.”

Gleason said that while the majority of area residents do not disapprove of the memorial, “It does not matter how people react when it comes to something unconstitutional.”

Gleason compared the case to the Allah Test: “Replace Christians with Muslims and replace their Christian God with Allah. How would people feel about that?” he asked.

“This is a very tight rope we are treading,” Gleason said. “You can see politics happen today where religion is everywhere.”

The current 43-foot cross was constructed in 1954 to replace earlier versions, the first of which was erected in 1913. On Easter Sunday 1954, the cross was dedicated to “Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ” as a tribute to veterans of World War I, World War II, and the Korean Conflict. For decades, the only memorial services occurring at the site were on Easter Sunday, not secular holidays such as Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day, until a lawsuit was filed in 1989 claiming the cross violated the US Constitution’s First Amendment Establishment Clause. Since then, the cross has been in constant litigation.

After the first lawsuit was filed in 1989, elected officials within the San Diego City Council, US Congress, and even the White House have favored and/or voted for the cross’s presence. Nonetheless, the Judicial Branch has fairly consistently ruled that the cross’s presence on public property violates the US Constitution. After each ruling against them however, the cross’ supporters engineer new mechanisms designed to maintain the cross’ presence on Mount Soledad.

As part of the effort to discover a Constitutionally legal mechanism to maintain the cross on Mount Soledad, in the mid-2000s elections were held and ownership of the land beneath the Mount Soledad cross was transferred from the city to the U.S. Department of Defense. Supporters hoped that the cross would be safe from removal if Congress declared it a national war monument.

By May of 2006 however, Federal District Court Judge Gordon Thompson, Jr.—fifteen years after his first decision in 1991, ruled that “It is now time, and perhaps long overdue for this court to enforce its initial injunction,” and gave the city 90 days to remove the cross or face a fine of $5000 a day.”

The City of San Diego appealed to the US Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case, and years of further legal wrangling ensued.

The U.S. Supreme Court provided a more formal test of whether religion and state was being unconstitutionally mixed in its 1971 Lemon vs. Kurtzman ruling, also known as “The Lemon Law,” which is used with legislation concerning religion must pass all three “Lemon test” prongs to be constitutional: The statue must have secular legislative purpose, its primary purpose may not advance or inhibit religion, and it may not excessively entangle government with religion.

Gleason said that while putting a statue of a horse-mounted soldier on a war memorial represents every soldier and serves a secular purpose, erecting a huge cross on that same memorial does not. “It entangles Government with religion,” he said.

Illustration by Laura Collins

The Catholic Church is scrutinizing the Obama administration’s new mandate requiring religious-based institutions to provide contraception for their employees, despite a new compromise announced Friday.

The Obama administration’s mandate ignited a religious debate, with many Catholic institutions crying out that the new mandate was a breach of their religious freedom. With the mandate’s new changes, religious organizations will not have to pay for or directly provide contraceptive services, President Obama announced Friday.

Along with several other Catholic universities, DePaul University, which is the nation’s largest Catholic university, already offers contraceptives in both its fully insured HMO plan and its self-insured PPO plan.

“The heart of it is pretty simple,” DePaul University President Father Dennis Holtschneider said in an email to The DePaulia. “DePaul fully supports the bishops’ stance, but has offered [contraceptive] benefits ever since both Illinois and the Federal government required us to do so several years ago.”

Catholic and other religious-based institutions across Illinois have historically been able to avoid a state mandate requirement to include contraception in employees’ health benefits.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement late Friday expressing their opposition to the new compromise. The Bishops oppose the new mandate saying that the rule forces private health plans to cover sterilization and contraception at “the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen”. The Bishops argue that mandated preventative services should not include birth control and contraceptives because pregnancy is not a disease.

The mandate would have forced religiously affiliated institutions—such as DePaul University—to provide access to birth control for women employees unless they can show reason for qualifying for the exemption, they must comply with the new law by August 2013. Doctors who do not agree with contraceptives will not be forced to prescribe birth control. Both the new and old mandates exclude churches and only include religiously affiliated institutions.

“Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptives … no matter where they work, so that core principle remains,” Obama said in his announcement. “But, if a women’s place of work is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to provide contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company, not the hospital, not the charity, will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge, without co-pays and without hassles.”

Twelve years ago, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ruled that the exclusion of contraceptives from health insurance coverage is discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Several years later, DePaul University added birth control to its health insurance coverage after complaints from the EEOC.

DePaul University’s official statement expressed disappointment in the Obama administration’s decision not to include religious educational institutions under the exemption umbrella.

“The University’s position on this issue is fully aligned with that of the Catholic Health Association, which recently expressed its disappointment ‘that the definition of a religious employer was not broadened’ to encompass Catholic educational and other institutions in the new federal regulations for health insurance plans,” said Robin Florzak, DePaul’s interim assistant vice president of public relations and communications.

DePaul University released a new statement after the Friday amendment saying, “DePaul is encouraged by the administration’s willingness to forge a compromise, but it would be premature to discuss it further until the university has had time to fully review the administration’s new approach.”

Nearly half of Americans said religiously affiliated colleges and hospitals should be required to provide their employees with contraceptives or birth control through health care plans at no cost, according to a survey released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute. According to the survey, 52 percent of Catholics say religiously affiliated colleges and hospitals should have to provide coverage that includes contraception.

According to a study released last April by the Guttmacher Institute, 99 percent of women have used a contraceptive method other than family planning. Similarly, 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptive methods.

The announcement made Jan. 20 by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sibelius, has sent media personnel from Catholic and other religious-based institutions behind closed doors scrambling to generate a politically correct statement for the press.

Contraception was already partially covered through health plans of religiously affiliated institutions in 28 states. Obama’s health care law changes that coverage from partial to full.

Annie Hughes, Loyola University of Chicago’s marketing and communications associate wrote a statement about the original ruling and said: “Loyola University Chicago joins the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities … in expressing our profound disappointment in the recently announced Department of Health and Human Services ruling. The ruling narrowly defines the “religious employer” exemption and therefore requires all faith-based hospitals, universities, and social service agencies to cover contraceptive, sterilization, and abortifacient products and services in their employee and student-health plans that are contrary to the religious commitments of our institutions.”

Many of these religious officials, who oppose the new health care law, believe that their organizations should have the freedom to follow their beliefs, and that it is wrong for the Obama administration to mandate a law that goes against those beliefs.

“The key ruling that we take issue with is that the mandate, without a broader religious employer exception, constitutes an unprecedented attack on the religious liberty of Catholic and other religious institutions who have served the common good of our country since its founding, a founding based upon the very notion of religious freedom now at stake,” said Hughes.

Many Catholic universities such as Georgetown, Loyola University Chicago and Fordham University will provide contraceptives for medical reasons and not for birth control.

But, the facts presented by the Obama administration based on the Institute of Medicine’s recommendation leaves little hope that such an exemption will be granted to these institutions. According to the Institute of Medicine, one in two pregnancies are unplanned and four in 10 of those pregnancies may lead to abortions.

Still, Catholic and other religious institutions continue to argue that birth control goes against the core of their principles.

“The mandate rests upon an excessively narrow definition of “religious employer” that excludes religious hospitals, social service agencies, and universities from its definition. It undermines our ability to do our shared work with the requisite religious freedom protected by law,” Hughes said.

Obama officials have maintained that the objective of the law is not to offend or infringe upon anyone’s religious beliefs. It is intended to protect the rights of female employees who work for religious affiliated institutions.

As the debate continues, some religious leaders are encouraging their parishioners to voice their opinions to their lawmakers, while others are putting their trust in the decisions of their institutions.

“I respect very much faith-based institutions’ right to make decisions based upon their identities,” said the DePaul University CDM and law school chaplain, Tom Judge. “I also respect DePaul’s right to discern what is most consistent with our mission, as well.”

“This misguided decision on the part of the Department of Health and Human Services would force our institution to violate well-known, well-established, and, until now, well-protected moral commitments,” Hughes said. “In good conscience, we cannot abide by such a law as it stands. We are currently in conversation with our colleagues to plan further action toward correcting this erroneous decision.”

“The employee health insurance plans include a prescription contraceptive benefit, in compliance with state and federal law,” Florzak said. “An optional insurance plan that covers such benefits is available to students, also due to previously established state and federal requirements.”

According to Holtschneider, there are no conversations inside the university about changing DePaul’s health coverage with regards to contraceptives. “Illinois law remains Illinois law,” he said.

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This article was co-authored by Rachel Metea and Rima Thompson and originally printed in The Depaulia.

Cookie Monster, meet brutal legend Eddie Riggs. Brutal legend, Cookie Monster. Money’s tight, but for now, the worlds of heavy metal and Sesame Street will not collide because under Double Fine’s Roof, everyone can still be different.

Tim Schafer is renowned for his creative video design. His video San Francisco-based company , Double Fine Productions, has a style that moves from a video game on heavy metal to a Tim Burton-esque story about kids at summer camp to. He serves on the advisory board for the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s upcoming exhibition, “The Art of Video Games.” But despite his popularity and cult following, Schafer said making payroll for his company is still very challenging.

“My goal has always been to bring things to games that are not typical to games because games have a very standard art style,” Schafer said, “like muscly, space marines, veins in their neck and you know, big guns.”

Double Fine Production’s concept art for “Stacking”. Image Courtesy of Double Fine.

“More inspiration is needed on the art side of video games,” Nathan Martz said, who was the project lead for Double Fine’s  “Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster,” which was released last October. Most video games are very drab, Martz said. “They are realistic, but post-apocalyptic.”

Consumers in the U.S. reportedly spent an estimated $4.5 billion on video games in Q2 2011, according to market researcher NPD. The popular “post-apocalyptic” style described by both Schafer Double Team Technical Director Nathan Martz was not used in Ninetendo’s colorful New Super Mario Bros., the top selling video game of 2010. However, it was used in both the second (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 by Activision) and third (Battlefield: Bad Company 2 by Electronic Arts) top selling games of that year.

Electronic Arts’ “Battlefield: Bad Company 2″ (left) and Activision’s “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ (right) were the second and third top-selling video games in 2010, respectively. 

In 2005, Double Fine’s “Psychonauts” received more than 15 awards. The majority falling into two honorable, but distinct categories: The “Best Game No one Played” or the “Overall Game of the Year”/”Editor’s Choice” award. The games are beautifully refreshing, but just not enough for what Schafer calls the “cash cows.”

The big question, Schafer said, is how to make a game that is both artistically different and profitable.

“We always think that if we make a game look beautiful and make it look interesting then a lot of people will come play it,” Schafer said. “But sometimes, it seems that games that just look like other games sell better.”

Martz said there is “constant pressure” for the company to sacrifice its artistic style.

“Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster,” which was developed for adults to play with children and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, did not need to be stylized to appease its ranging age groups because according to Martz, “real creative quality is often not age specific.”

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

“Art is one of the most important tools for telling you how to feel,” Martz said. “Because it is such a powerful tool, we used it to set the emotional tone of the game.”

Double Fine’s Sesame Street video game is the company’s first product based on a licensed property. Schafer said they knew Sesame Street’s familiarity with people would help broaden the game’s audience.

“If you are going to do a license,” Schafer said, “you shouldn’t do something that is a cheap cash in. Sesame Street is something that has a higher purpose. They are there for the good of children and they really want to do good in the world, so I think they were a great partner for us to have.”

“We also have a very big soft spot for the cookie monster, so it just had an appeal to us,” said Schafer, who is the father of a 3-year-old girl.

Schafer said it can be really difficult to predict why or what people are going to like. “But for the most part, we are just trying to make games that look good and will appeal to people. We might not have the same taste that the vast majority of people have, but I think a lot of interesting stuff becomes a mass hit all of the time.

“Video games aren’t like movies where everyone goes to the movies, Schafer said. “There is a kind of movie for everybody: A romantic movie, a comedy, a movie your grandparents like, and a movie little kids like … games aren’t like that yet. Mostly, some are action games or some are puzzle games. They are limited in number for different types that people can go to.”

Schaffer admitted that this is changing, saying the invention of mobile apps and Facebook game’s is leading many people to try iPhone games or Facebook games who are not typically “hard-core gamers.”

“The video game industry is broadening out,” he said, “but I would like to see it broaden out in ways different than Farmville or Angry Birds, to just broaden out in terms of deeper narratives and characters, and fantasy worlds that are unique, fun to go to and interesting and thought provoking,” he said, all of those things that great books and movies are.”

The company is currently working to develop mobile games. Both Schafer and Martz would not discuss further details as to what games they are currently developing. Developing mobile games is “a strictly business move,” Schafer said. “To be honest, we are just trying to see if that’s an area where we can make money,” he said.

Schafer said the mobile games will encompass the narrative style typical to Double Fine games. “We just first want to see if we can sell any and if we can make money,” he said. “Of course, we don’t want to do anything that wouldn’t be in our our style so it would still have our sort of quirky art style and sense of humor.”

“But mostly,” Schafer said, “we are just an independent company that is trying to stay alive,” he said. “We try to stay true to the things we care about, but we are also trying to make payroll every week.”

“It’s funny to say that originality and creativity are at odds with commercialness,” Martz said. “That is often true, but if you look at any big break out- usually it is original. When enough people try out new ideas and they catch hold, they become what people copy. “We try to lead that by having ideas that are strong and worth making.”

“The hero ends so much more than it lasts a bore,”John Szwed, a professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University while giving a lecture, “Miles Davis: The Jazz Musician as Dandy” at DePaul University on Oct. 17. He continued, “And nothing is more boring than a hero left over from an era that people want to forget.”

Twenty years after Miles Davis’ death and the world still turns. Iconic beauties are still bountiful, but few master the art form of becoming a legacy.

“This was a challenge that Miles would confront by changing his music and his clothes again and again,” Szwed said. Davis dressed both up and down, Szwed said, “and he would do this back and forth so at one point you would wear what looks like hip-hop clothes and the next time you see him he is wearing the most extreme Japanese fashion.”

To Davis, style was part of his art. It was just as much of an expression going into his music as it was coming out.

“Never for a second did [Davis] allow anyone to believe that he was just there to entertain,” Szwed said. “On one occasion he might come in with the auteur of royalty on another he might appear as the artist principal of violence.”

Miles Davis (left) and Andy Warhol (right) were the star models in a fashion show two days before Warhol's death.

Szwed recalled one of Davis’ most iconic moments- the night he was in a fashion show with Andy Warhol. Poking fun at Warhol’s runway walk, Davis said, “Why do models walk like models? I can walk better. Check this out.” Davis asked Warhol to carry the end of his cape like a train while he played his trumpet down the runway. With that, the two took off down the runway.

In the late nineties, Davis was featured in part of Apple’s “Think Differently” campaign. According to Szwed, Steve Jobs said he did not want sound to play during the musician’s TV ad. These icons  approached their work with a worldview encompassed by heightened senses and it was always hip.

One of the few to understand that style is not the makeup, but the flesh of a product was Steve Jobs.

Jobs attributed much of Apple’s beauty to a calligraphy class he sat in on after dropping out of college. The class did not have any practical application to my life, Jobs said in a 2005 Commencement address to Standford University. “But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.”

Today’s apple products are beautiful. They are not just products that are hip and highly-coveted, but producers of making something even bigger hip: Technology.

After Jobs died on Oct. 5, newspapers, televisions, and the Internet were splashed with opinions over the loss of the “visionary”.

Miles Davis’ image is still with us,” Szwed said at the end of his lecture, “even among those who aren’t quite sure who he was, so I want to close with some of these current visions of Davis.”

Visions.

Icons come and go but a legacy lasts forever. While the next is unknown, Miles Davis’ and Steve Jobs’ visionary legacy lives on.

The El screeched to a stop, the iPod clicked off and the cellphone switched to silent. The doors opened and Minimalism passed over.

Simplistic new forms take shape with the old in “The Language of Less (Then and Now),” the new exhibit at The Museum of Contemporary Art.

The MCA translates minimalism from the old and new by dividing the exhibit into two parts, one devoted to classic Minimalist art from the 1960s and 1970s and the other featuring five contemporary artists working in the style of their forebears and in the mind of modern times.

Juxtaposed together, the exhibit’s two distinct parts suggests a nostalgia and struggle for simplicity in a world of digitized chaos.

“Then,” the exhibit’s first part, Minimalist art from artists such as Jo Baer, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris. shows a moment in time when simplicity was lucid. A film that lasts a lifetime is reflected in Tony Conrad’s “Yellow Movie 2/28/73” (1973), which blankets the wall with a black rectangle centered on a buttery white sheet.

Gordon Matta-Clark's 1974 "Untitled" 1974 hangs on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago's new exhibit, "The Language of Less (Then and Now). (Photo by Rachel Metea)

Gordon Matta-Clarks’s “Untitled” (1974) beautifully captures minimalistic eloquence in one of his “cut drawings,” a series Matta-Clark developed by cutting geometric shapes into boards, reminiscent of Constructivism.

Clarity only echoes from the first part of the exhibit when moving to “Now.” Objects and disorder transfix the artwork and the only minimal portion of the art its conceptual development. Jason Dodge’s “Sleeping in the order of the slowing of time” showcases a pillow only slept on by Botanist Dorit Vath.

“Now” is smudged with objects and unsubtle in their shape and form. Many glimpse at the minimalistic concepts of the forbearing Minimalism art, but seem too transfixed with chaos for physical clarity and feature or physical and electronic objects. Gravity is sought to be reminded of by Dodge with a tipped-over bathroom scale.

“Now” looses the simple beauty framed inside Fred Sandback’s 1974 “Helium,” a “Then” artwork with the words: “There exists a sculpture consisting of all infrared radiation present in my studio on 11th street in Brooklyn” typed in small grey letters on a sheet of paper.

Minimalistic design strikes the hardest, a concept that pushed the iPod’s success. Carefully-crafted complexity—the device’ programming—is packaged in a sleek design making it beautiful to the user. Only first exhibit captures this iPod trait and “Now” is bogged down by minds shaped by today’s digitized chaos, a less than minimal irony.