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Enlightenment’s Islam: A “Necessary Fiction”

By Rob Goodman

…“Muslim Mural is UNNECESSARY provocation.” Tempers are running even higher online, where noted blogger and Islam critic Pamela Geller called the mural “a stab in the eye”…. None of the above is really fictional. All of the quotes are authentic; I just borrowed them from the “Ground Zero Mosque” saga. The “Islam” mural is real, too. You can see it for yourself in a proud spot on the dome of the Library of Congress, part of a series called “Human Kn…

How Mega-Macho-Pastor Mark Driscoll Helps Explain Trump’s Evangelical Support

By Jessica Johnson

…racting publicity and followers. Driscoll’s pugnacious public performances online and in the pulpit weren’t only politically incorrect but generated glee, conviction and hope—the same infectious embodied affects contagiously passed along via the rally cries, raised fists and laughing faces at Trump campaign events. Best to consider Trump and Driscoll’s seemingly paradoxical ascendance in popularity among U.S. evangelicals not as anomaly but as tre…

Senate Candidate Todd Akin’s Anti-Abortion Acquaintances from the Late ’80s

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…wn for its role in creating and compiling the so-called “Nuremberg Files”: online dossiers on abortion providers and abortion supporters including their work addresses, photos, and places of worship. There was a trial, and Dreste himself was fined millions in damages, according to a 1999 investigative piece on Dreste by the St. Louis Riverfront Times: The defendants, two anti-abortion groups and 12 individuals, including Dreste, were not charged w…

I’m Too Sexy for My Church: Will a Thriving Singles Scene Renew American Catholicism?

By Megan Sweas

…guys and girls. But in a time of declining demographics, and an upswing in online dating, the popularity of such parishes appears almost as an act of defiance. According to the Pew Research Center, the Catholic share of the population has been dropping steadily and getting older. To make matters worse, 41 percent of Catholics ages 18-30 could imagine leaving the Catholic Church someday. While 10 percent of millennials still consider themselves to…

Civil Unions Battle Heats Up in Italy; Church Leaders in Malawi Defend Criminalization of Homosexuality; Report on LGBT Student Group Sparks Backlash in Indonesia; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ah, which ranks in the top five of U.S. states in teen suicide, though the numbers have not been verified. In response to the Mama Dragons report, church officials mourned the deaths and called on churches and family members to make LGBT youth feel welcome. Tanzania: Activist Profiled The latest “world voices” feature from Alturi tells the story of James Ouma, an LGBTI activist who speaks “against a growing religious backlash in Tanzania while he…

Porn-Again Christians: What Happens When a Biblical Literalist Launches a Sex Site?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…rting the site mirrors the reasons I used back in 1996 when I began my own online magazine, Whosoever, for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Christians. I don’t think my site was on the web for five minutes before I started receiving hate mail demanding that I take the site down because it was an affront to God. I was told then, and many still say even today, that there’s no such thing as a “gay Christian” because the two are mutually exclusi…

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Blames Gays For ISIS; ‘Christian Nationalist’ Sworn In As Guatemala’s President; Vatican Resists Civil Unions in Italy; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ally mean it.” … A video of the Biden’s remarks the Huffington Post posted online shows the vice president striking the table with his palms as he spoke during the roundtable. “Culture never justifies rank, raw, discrimination or violation of human rights,” said Biden. “There is no cultural justification. None. None. None.” Biden also noted consensual same-sex sexual acts remain criminalized in more than 70 countries. “I have had some run ins with…

Drop that Candy Bar, Pagan!

By Peter Montgomery

…on the earth. Don’t despair if you can’t make it to Dallas, you can watch online starting at 7 p.m. Central. But if your kids really like candy, you can comfort yourself with the approach to Halloween taken by Mars Hill church, the authoritarian megachurch phenomenon associated with hipster homophobe Mark Driscoll that has spawned survivors’ blogs. In an article promoted by the church’s Resurgence ministry, Pastor Justin Holcomb says Halloween’s…

#VanillaISIS, White Tears and the Adventures of Captain Moroni

By Megan Goodwin

…r major social media responses to the standoff: that is, concerns of race. Online communities have emphasized the discrepancies between FBI responses to this white militia and the militarism and violence unarmed #BlackLivesMatter protesters have faced in Missouri, Maryland, Minnesota and elsewhere. And of course the Church, like Oregon, like America, has a checkered past in matters of racial difference. The racial conflicts surfaced by the Bundy u…

How Orthodox Christianity Became the Spiritual Home of White Nationalism

By Katherine Kelaidis

…iocese of North America and then only after immense pressure following the online circulation of photographs in which Heimbach appears to be beating a University of Indiana at Bloomington SlutWalk participant with an Orthodox cross. While Heimbach’s excommunication by the Antiochian bishop means that he is technically unable to receive the sacraments in any canonical Orthodox church, he claims to have found a sympathetic priest in Romania who allo…