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Pope Denounces Gender Colonization; Indonesian Court Considers Islamist Request To Criminalize Homosexuality; Egypt’s Grand Mufti Says No One Has Right to Harm Homosexuals; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…and we are not ready to take any editorial advice from the state… It is unfortunate that CBFC is being used as a tool to propagate homophobia and sexual bigotry.” In an interview to The News Minute earlier this month, Jayan spoke about the hassles he was facing to get his film released in India and blamed the Censor Board for being “feudal, homophobic and very much misogynist”. Uganda: Police arrest pride participants; parade cancelled under mob…

Is Army’s New “Humanist” Designation Just Semantic Hooey?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…plains approved for military service, though MAAF reports that there are a number of Atheist and Humanist chaplain assistants. The DOD’s ruling this week may, thus, have a meaningful impact on the free expression of religious identity for the reported 3.6% of service members who are Humanists and allow more diverse access to resources for spiritual care and the development of communities of support. While the decision certainly reflects growth i…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…ld soon be feeling the need to leave her home country. Not surprisingly, a number of Western women felt moved to show their support for Amina. An international movement called Femen staged bare-breasted protests in European cities, in which the writings on their chests echoed Amina’s, along with “Freedom for women” and “Fuck your morals.” (Be warned: photos contain nudity and strong language.) But Femen did not have the last word. Almost immediat…

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…cy is not something we discuss very often. Our rates of incarceration, the number of states utilizing the death penalty, our obsessive clinging to the Second Amendment along with its deadly consequences, ICE raids on immigrant families fleeing even worse violence in their home countries, drone strikes, the environmental violence of fracking, deforestation and coal mining, and the daily threats faced by women, LGBTQ people and people of color are a…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…delights in surfacing little-known factoids. These include the remarkable number of commercial hucksters who were preachers or else preachers’ kids (e.g., Richard Bolles of What Color is Your Parachute? fame—a former Episcopal priest) and the equally remarkable number of notable preachers who had strong commercial instincts and/or commercial roots (ranging from 18th-century superstar evangelist George Whitefield to 19th-century revivalist giant C…

‘Cult’ Is an Inaccurate, Unhelpful and Dangerous Label for Followers of Trump, QAnon, and 1/6

By Catherine Wessinger

…News and One American News Network (OANN), along with a not insignificant number of elected members of Congress. A great deal of the concern on the part of white people is over their potential loss of status in America. This concern is being expressed in current Trumpist Republican efforts to curb access to voting by people of color and the social panic being fomented about “Critical Race Theory,” which has been turned into a pejorative term by p…

Religion and Other Animals

By Paul Waldau

…pirituality. In fact, “religion and animals” themes appear in a surprising number of places—one example is Peter Miller’s article “Jane Goodall” in the December 1995 National Geographic, in which he discusses Goodall’s belief that expressions of awe by chimpanzees at a waterfall site “may resemble the emotions that led early humans to religion.” The debate over whether or not our animal neighbors can be “religious” is but one issue in the growing…

No Conspiracy Theories Needed: Abortion Foes Cry Racism

By Kathryn Joyce

…hese clunky historical facts, Obama’s presidency and the GOP’s dismaying efforts to appeal to “the hip-hop generation” appear to have prompted resurgent interest in these arguments as a race-conscious update to the anti-abortion message. Since late December, a number of anti-abortion organizations have made public and prominent hires of activists who frame their anti-abortion work in such terms: Pro-Life Unity hired a vice president, Samuel Mostel…

Evangelical Pastor Argues for Full LGBT Inclusion: “I Think It’s Inevitable”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…you to write this book? I had been doing a rethink on this question for a number of years and my convictions had changed but I didn’t know how to process it in the congregation at that stage. I had processed it with the church board and pastoral staff and different leaders. I was doing a lectio divina when I got the idea to write a letter to my congregation. I didn’t want to have congregational meetings to talk about how to handle this because th…

Islamic Intellectual Leadership at a Crossroads

By Amina Wadud

…on in the future—especially the men, whether or not Tariq Ramadan feels comfortable being included among them. We have an increasing number of men recognized as intellectuals whose self-appointed role as leaders gives me pause. Is this the result of having leading ideas that we all can follow and benefit from, like these three men? Or what about the question of the integrity of leadership, does it bring the scholarly contributions under question?…