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Dragged Through the Mud: This Little Church-Backed Support Group for LGBTQ Teens Suffered Bomb Threats, Smears and the Cancellation of its Drag Show

By Chrissy Stroop

…events. The performances raise money to send local queer kids to a summer camp—Camp Fruit Loop—where they can simply be themselves and be supported. Each past show easily sold out, which prompted the group to look at larger venues. This year, they rented the 500-seat auditorium at Roseville High School for a March 31 performance. Everything was going fine until right-wing activists decided to manufacture outrage, insinuating that this was a schoo…

Prayer vigil for Las Vegas shooting victim Sonny Melton (WBBJ TV)

No Way Out But The Ballot Box: Why Partisanship Trumps Morality In Gun Control Debate

By Daniel Schultz

…d to the teeth will be introduced. No demonstration, no email petition, no call-in campaign to Congress will finally solve the problem of easy access to guns, because the political system is structured to prevent such a solution. The only way to change the depraved American situation will be to change its depraved political system, and that will require a change in who controls that system. Maybe Matt Bevin is right. Maybe you can’t regulate evil….

A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…in his long and arduous path to Christianity. As I searched for a theological category to come to terms with our context, the word concupiscence leapt out at me. A theme that emerges in Augustine’s corpus is how we have misguided desire, or lust and passion, in relation to the material world and other human beings. How does Augustine define lust and passion? He often describes it as concupiscence: strong desire, especially sexual, that sometimes…

Are Evangelical Films Destined to Leave Secular Audiences Behind?

By Daniel Silliman

…make was just about money. He was exhausted by questions about whether Nicolas Cage could do a good job as an actor in an evangelical film, since he wasn’t “covered in the blood of the lamb.” He was exasperated at people telling him they liked the old Left Behind movies with Kirk Cameron and couldn’t see anything good coming out of Hollywood versions. Had he even asked Kirk Cameron to be involved in these movies? Why did Hollywood have to ruin eve…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…slims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us out to be (our earliest heroes include Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Malcolm X), but we’ve had real problems with narrow-mindedness, institutional immaturity, misogyny, and religious illiteracy—these persist in places, but I think not like they did before. And that’s because American Muslims were able to separate Islam from its prac…

Corporations Have Consciences and Contraceptives Are Cheap: Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court

By Sarah Posner

…an exemption from covering ella, Plan B, and IUDs, claiming that they may cause an abortion. Scalia declared these methods “not terribly expensive.” But Verilla pointed out that the IUD, one of the most effective methods of birth control, is also one of the most expensive. (They can cost as much as $1,000.) As expected, the Court did not question in any depth the companies’ claim that these methods are abortifacients. But in response to a hypothe…

Baby We Were Born for War: To Dominionist Christian Groups, No Election is Too Small — and Colorado is Just the Beginning

By Frederick Clarkson

…y, sleepy school board races across the state and the country, this year became political hot potatoes. The Colorado media generally cast these contests as battles between conservative groups and teachers unions, and that the results were mixed. But lost in this framing was the quiet electoral pilot project of the Truth and Liberty Coalition, the other arms of Wommack’s political and educational empire—and their out-of-state partner, the Texas-bas…

Landmark OC Megachurch Declares Bankruptcy

By Joanna Brooks

…other debts. Schueller, who grew up an Iowa farmboy, began his ministry in Orange County, California, in 1955, convening his first services at the Orange Drive-in Theater. In 1957, Schueller invited pop psychologist Vincent Norman Peale to speak, minting the brand of accentuate-the-positive-preaching that propelled him to the heights of his success in the 1980s. In those years, they bussed Orange County public school kids like me on field trips to…

Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

By Andrew Aghapour

…statement of fault. For example, I withheld my own judgment of JetBlue and assumed larger possible causes, until they also cancelled our final flight home during Emmie’s and my return from Iran. Now I can call JetBlue a motherfucker with confidence. And it’s all thanks to science. *Note: Follow these links for full length interviews with Richard Rothstein and Bertram Malle….

ACLU Defense of Religious Freedom Lost on Virginia Students

By Lauri Lebo

…hey wanted the Ten Commandments placed back in their school. “This is America and we can have our Ten Commandments and if they don’t like it, they can get out,” said one boy. What’s so sad is that this could be a valuable civics lesson to the district’s students. I like to see kids protesting and engaging in civil discourse as much as the next American with a strong anti-authoritarian streak. But the issue of what they were protesting appears to h…