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Historic Prayer by Woman at LDS General Conference Signals Growing Concern with Gender Equality

By Joanna Brooks

…ce, January’s release of a new, more theologically rigorous curriculum for Sunday meetings for young women, and Friday’s announcement that women will now hold positions of increased authority in overseeing the Church’s global proselytizing missions—an advance that follows a surge in numbers of women missionaries. Some observers believe that the changes are part of a concerted LDS Church effort to bolster its rates of retention among younger women….

On the Ethics of the Tibetan Self-Immolations

By José Cabezón

…e path of not hurting others for the sake of our freedom.” Chung Tsering, “Online Articles on Self-immolation,” 102. The view is similar to one by Boepa Bhumo (“Tibetan Woman”), who posted on a Time magazine blog on Feburary 15, 2013: “Tibetans who have immolated in Tibet could have used this tactics to burn few Chinese together along [with themsleves]… but they never adopted such [a tactic] because we have never believed in any forms of violence….

In the Aftermath of the “Himalayan Tsunami”

By Luke Whitmore

…y by the growing Indian middle class. Roads widened and hotels and visitor services grew exponentially. Building a new hotel or a restaurant by the side of the road felt like a smart investment—even when the road was near a river. Kedarnath saw the building of new cell phone towers, a railway reservation office, helicopter landing pads, lodges with hot water available in the room. Prices soared. When a wave of water and rock crashed down upon Keda…

Scott Lively Defends Anti-Gay Uganda Work in Federal Court

By Peter Montgomery

…ay activists in the public arena. Lively’s lawyer, Harry Mihet, said in an online conversation hosted by The Huffington Post on Tuesday that the case is “ridiculous and frivolous.” He echoed claims that Liberty Counsel has been making that the lawsuit is an effort to silence Lively and others for expressing their personal beliefs about homosexuality. CCR Attorney Pam Spees countered that Lively’s work in Uganda has gone well beyond the expression…

Bush Era to Blame for Renewed Interest in Mainline?

By Paul Harvey

…: “A Religious Legacy, With Its Leftward Tilt, is Reconsidered,” available online and in the July 24th print edition. Jennifer Schuessler, who covers the academic beat for the New York Times, discusses the resurgence of scholarship on people long since thought to have been dead and passed from the scene: dead, (mostly) white, mainstream/liberal/mainline/ecumenical Protestants. In assessing the roots of a surge of work on 20th-century liberal Prot…

Maybe Millennials Are Just Realizing That ‘God is Dead’

By Hollis Phelps

…s involves little more than “a few style updates—edgier music, more casual services, a coffee shop in the fellowship hall, a pastor who wears skinny jeans, an updated Web site that includes online giving.” Citing polling data, Evans notes that the problem is one of substance rather than style: “young adults perceive evangelical Christianity to be too political, too exclusive, old-fashioned, unconcerned with social justice and hostile to lesbian, g…

“Ex-Gay” Gospel Star Donnie McClurkin and the Decline of Public Theology

By Joshua L. Lazard

…nie McClurkin. McClurkin is a gospel artist whose music is heard any given Sunday in churches across the nation. During the summer many gather around televisions to watch him judge contestants in a singing contest on BET’s “Sunday Best.” By all accounts he is the epitome of mainstream in the gospel music arena. It would make sense to invite him to participate in a major event that features gospel music—but Donnie’s public theology proved to be too…

New Study Claims to ‘Explain’ Near-Death Religious Experiences

By Michael Schulson

…oscience. But there’s no need to panic and reassure believers, as Catholic Online recently did, that “faith remains strong” even after this “gruesome study involving rats.” Sure, The Economist is now suggesting that if near-death experiences are divine, then rats must have souls, and there’s always the overeager journalist who will jump to conclusions and claim that scientists have totally and finally solved near-death experiences. But it seems pr…

Lindsey Graham and Al Qaeda Share the Same “Allahu Akbar”

By Nathan Lean

…nefarious Egyptian doctor posted “general guidelines for jihad” on several online forums, as if he, of all people, is the authoritative voice for defining such things. Absurdly, for many people on the right, he is, the authoritative voice. Graham and others employ the term precisely in a way that legitimizes that understanding and gives currency to such usage in discourses about Muslims. For them, Zawahiri’s jihad is more correct than the jihad of…

Mormon Women Knock at the Door, Are Turned Away

By Holly Welker

…us by would be,” Ordain Women founder Kate Kelly wrote on the group’s blog Sunday morning. Although Peterson remained affable through all the exchanges, the doors to the Tabernacle closed promptly at 6 p.m. when the priesthood session started, even though about twenty women remained in line. Immediately thereafter, a small garbage truck was parked in front of the door, barring women any access to it. The group then sang “I Am a Child of God,” a fa…