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Marriage equality and ‘the end of Catholic Ireland’; Gambian Prez vows to slit gays’ throats; Colombian govt affirms support for marriage and adoption; global LGBT recap

By Peter Montgomery

…t told Uganda’s Kuchu Times, a news outlet run by LGBT activists in east Africa…. Indeed, Kuchu Times reflected on the hostile environment LGBT Africans face in the media, lamenting that “Such incidences where the media has incited violence to the point of death should serve as a lesson not to put other people’s lives in danger, but not in Africa.” Critics included many of the paper’s own readers: Comments on the newspaper’s website were overwhelm…

Belize Overturns Sodomy Law Defended by Religious Right, Ugandan Officials Will Continue to Suppress Gay Groups, And More on the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…l in 2014, month, is now available in English. The documentary features American anti-gay activist Scott Lively warning that in America most people oppose homosexuality but are too afraid of the powerful gay lobby to speak about it. Lively eventually appears on camera to rail against the LGBT-friendly “Queen James Bible,” which he calls “an abomination before God.” “There is no sacred ground for the homosexuals,” Lively says. “There is nothing tha…

Workers Once Forced the Social Gospel Into Churches—Can It Happen Again?

By Eric C. Miller

…way from a repeat of their late-nineteenth-century insurgency. There are a number of historical explanations for this. Certainly the Cold War baptism of “free enterprise” as a distinctively Christian way of doing business worked to erode social Christianity’s hold at the grassroots. The surging prosperity gospel of our own times has done further damage. All this being said, there are some favorable trends. The resources available to working people…

Data-Mining Denominations: Same-Sex Marriage Edition

By Daniel Schultz

…people are by intensity, measured with the simple hack of subtracting the number of people Strongly Opposed to same-sex marriage from the number Strongly In Favor. Not surprisingly, since the Unitarian-Universalists only had 6 percent opposed, their position on the chart hardly budged at all. Other groups traveled a little more. Mainline Baptists, for example, strongly disapprove just a little more than they strongly approve. Evangelical Baptists…

Jonestown at 40: The Real Conspiracy Is More Disturbing Than the Theories

By Rebecca Moore

…been acquired, and dress rehearsals occurred, all with the complicity of a number of individuals. Unfortunately that cohort included my older sister Carolyn Layton and my younger sister Annie Moore (both of whom died in Jonestown). But quite a few others were part of the conspiracy as well, including the team of young men from Jonestown who ambushed Congressman Ryan and his party as they attempted to leave. Knowing the identities of the conspirato…

ABC’s Hit Sitcom Black-ish Does God, Pushes Theological Respectability

By Anthony B. Pinn

…ed simply “God,” encourages us to laugh with stereotypical depictions of African Americans as opposed to having us laugh at them—that is, to accept the stereotype as an inside joke. The episode centers on Zoey (Yara Shahidi), the eldest of the Johnson kids, who refuses to pray at the start of family dinner because she has growing doubt concerning the reality of God. For her, the suffering that overwhelms human experience challenges belief. Can the…

Rome Has Spoken and Rome Is Finished: The Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit ‘Failed Miserably’

By Mary E. Hunt

…ed minors and some covered it up. What’s so mysterious about that? A large number of minors have been sexually abused by a large number of clerics. Period. Full stop. It’s simply the beginning of a hideous story that includes the abuse of seminarians, nuns and other women, children of priests, and more, all of whom merit summits of their own. Francis’ discussion of power fell flat. He claimed that the sexual abuse of minors is an abuse of power. H…

What Color is Vatican Smoke?

By Marian Ronan

…n to become ordained to Sojourner Truth’s resistance to slavery. What an African-American woman says about ordination and slavery is none of my business. And I have no problem with white women’s ordination activists stating, as some do in Pink Smoke, that their courage to stand up to the Vatican and the bishops is inspired, in part at least, by the example of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. But putting one African American woman p…

The Plot to Turn the Synod into a “Plot”

By Patricia Miller

…nod is to take up. The Supreme Pontiff may, if he so chooses, increase the number of members of the Synod of Bishops by adding bishops, or religious to represent the religious institutes, or clerics who are experts, to the extent of fifteen percent of the total number of the members mentioned in articles V and VIII. Despite this, Douthat assures us that “as a Catholic,” he expects “the plot to ultimately fail; where the pope and the historic faith…

Before Black Twitter: How the Early Black Press Shaped American Discourse Around Race and Religion

By Benjamin P. Fagan

…y with the realization that, if we want to understand nineteenth-century African-American history, literature, politics—and of course religion—we have to consult black newspapers. With that in mind, I hope that readers come away with a desire to know more. My book traces one main thread (black chosenness) through five newspapers, and this approach means that I’ve only scratched the surface of the archive of the early black press. A handful of scho…