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Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…

‘Anti-Romeo’ Vigilante Squads Target Men Suspected Of Being Gay; More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…he Washington Post reports. “Because, you know, it’s been banned.” Finland: 800+ same-sex couples married in first month; Lutheran priests barred from officiating More than 800 same-sex couples were married in March after marriage equality went into effect on the first of the month; 770 had already been in civil partnerships. The Lutheran Evangelical Church has decreed that priests are not permitted to marry same-sex couples and some bishops warne…

Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

By Daniel Silliman

No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…

Want to Know What Public Education Would Look Like Under Project 2025? Just Take a Look at Oklahoma

By Andrew L. Seidel

…k down this absurd overreach. Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (and, full disclosure, my organization), called the court’s decision “a win for church-state separation and religious freedom” at a recent event at the Mayflower Congregational UCC Church in Oklahoma City—including “for everyone here in Oklahoma who objected to their tax dollars funding a school that proposes to discriminate and ind…

Palin’s Israel Trip

By Sarah Posner

…r her Israel trip, as it has done for other presidential hopefuls, instead booking it through a Christian tour agency. He thinks, perhaps, that Palin is miffed that he and other RJC board members have been critical of her, but that she’s unwise to rebuff them because they could be so helpful to her. But this is characteristically Palin behavior — with or without the criticism. She is, for example, the only GOP aspirant who has never spoken at the…

Perkins and MSNBC

By Sarah Posner

…y the group Faithful America launched a campaign to pressure MSNBC to stop booking Perkins as a guest on its programs, because of his history of anti-gay bigotry. The group attempted to place an ad on MSNBC that sets out their complaint, but MSNBC rejected it: Faithful America’s petition reads: “The Family Research Council is a hate group, and journalists ought to treat it as such. MSNBC must stop inviting Family Research Council spokespeople on t…

The “Obamosque” Smears and the Money Fueling Them

By Sarah Posner

Special Guests, a booking service that sends out daily press releases to reporters, producers, and radio shows, and which earlier this week described the proposed Park51 project as “Obamosque,” is today touting a Time magazine poll showing one quarter of Americans apparently believe President Obama is a Muslim. (A Pew poll out today shows that figure at 19%). Why do that many Americans believe that? Could it be the use of terms like “Obamosque?”…

“I’d Be Stupid Not To Go Packing Now.”

By Rev. Irene Monroe

…beat down of Duanna Johnson, an African American transwoman, in a Memphis booking room that was captured on a surveillance video. “I’d be stupid not to go packing now.” Williams lives in Oakland, just outside of San Francisco, and he’s going to check out the San Francisco chapter of Pink Pistols. As a national organization that encourages lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender to arm themselves to prevent hate crimes the Pink Pistols are also a s…

New Theory for Tucson Tragedy: Blame the Atheists

By Lauri Lebo

…lier post on some of the spins Special Guest is promoting here. Today, the booking site is promoting Ted Shoebat, who says that being an atheist leads one to commit mass murder. “It’s actually very simple,” Shoebat was quoted in Special Guest’s promotion, “When God is not in your life, evil will seek to fill the void.” And who is Shoebat? As Sarah wrote in a post in August: …(He) is the son of “ex-terrorist” Walid Shoebat, an over-exposed figure i…

SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

By Michael Schulson

…dless of their…profession,” but I somehow doubt that sanitation workers outnumber investment bankers in SoulCycle studios (one of which is across the street from the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Tribeca). Classes with popular instructors sell out in minutes, and patrons can pay upwards of $70 per class in order to get priority booking. “Ultimately, this is what brand religion is all about: stoking emotion with a combination of scarcity and urgenc…