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Morality and Marriage Vigilantes and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…civil code to make it legal for same-sex couples to get legally married. Japan: Sapporo preparing to register gay couples The city of Sapporo, capital of Hokkaido, is reportedly beginning a process that will lead to legal certification of gay couples by the end of March 2018. Taiwan: Police plan road closures for pro- and anti-marriage rallies Police announced that roads around the legislature will be closed on Monday for completing rallied by sup…

Two Women and a Mosque: A Convert Community Grows in Panama City

By Aliyya Swaby

…ple attend Friday prayer services every week, most of them Indian. But the number of Panamanian converts is rapidly growing. Bhattay said about two or three new converts come to Jama Mosque every week. Six months ago, the mosque began offering classes in Spanish — instead of just in Urdu — to accommodate the growing demand. There is no discrimination in the Muslim community in Panama City, Bhattay said. “Maybe ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, there…

Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

By Jason Josephson Storm

…ists, and artists travelling from Europe, Mexico, and the United States to participate in “shamanic” trance workshops under her leadership. My grandmother inspired me to become a scholar, but I was always skeptical of spirits, and moreover I was doubly skeptical of the notion that the modern Western world had lost its magic. I found myself shifting gears and looking at America and Europe through the eyes of an outsider—with the same sort of gaze o…

Religious Leaders Need ‘Empty the Pews’ Which Chronicles the Darker Side of the ‘Nones’ Phenomenon

By Kaya Oakes

…t their post-institutional faith is still a work in progress, for the most part these writers have departed religion without much in the way of regret. More than a few of the essays share a narrative arc which likely reveals something about what happens when a person is liberated from the rigid nature of a religion with an extremely limited world view. These often begin with the person remembering the breaking-point moment, then explain how the in…

‘Imagine Better’: Can Harry Potter Change the World?

By B. Howell Belser

…tical calendar. These include Wrock 4 Equality in October 2009, where the HPA campaigned for LGBT rights in Maine. Still other campaigns are driven by current events. The biggest of these to date was the Helping Haiti Heal campaign, during which the HPA along with other fan groups, raised $123,000 in just two weeks for medical supplies for their NGO partner, Partners In Health, in the wake of the January, 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The HPA also run…

Hold Your Applause: Potential Changes to Roles of Catholic Women and LGBTQ+ People May Just Be Vatican Breadcrumbing

By Mary E. Hunt

…us congregations are not lay people, and leaves all the final decisions in papal hands. Some people have found it a useful framework for raising important questions—notably some Germans who have progressive views and the money to make them stick. However, many bishops around the world took a pass on the whole thing. The Synod budget is minuscule if existent at all; apparently the Holy Spirit’s isn’t a union shop. The Synod texts, including the rec…

RD10Q: The Fight Against Feminism

By Kathryn Joyce

…esting events and developments have continued to happen all throughout the past year, such as the Department of Health and Human Services’ radical expansion of conscience clause regulations last fall, or some interesting “biblical womanhood” events, such as the True Woman Conference in Chicago. Also since completing the book, I’ve met and had more conversations with Christian women who are working to challenge some of the tenets of the Quiverfull…

New Poll: Evangelicals Backing Trump

By Daniel Schultz

…hile 46% think Trump could. Others, shall we say, do not. Buried deep in the poll summary, we find that black Protestants oppose Trump 89-8, which is nearly the 93-6 edge African-Americans in general gave Obama over Romney. Likewise, Hispanic Catholics favor Clinton 77-16, compared to the overall 71-27 Hispanic vote in 2012. Since both those groups are projected to make up the same portion of the electorate in 2016, if not larger, it might not be…

Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…e Internet is how we communicate with each other about current events, and partly because we don’t have a lot of space in our world for such public displays of mourning. (In contrast, recall the brutal murder of Leiby Kletzky, in 2010, and the fact that thousands of Hasidic Jews, who have a ritualized response to grief, descended upon Borough Park for his funeral.) The process sometimes dredges up uneasy feelings—a rubbernecker’s shame reflex, a p…

Growing Up Cult: A Memoir of Life with Sri Chinmoy

By Brittany Shoot

…ies risks; for the soul of the teacher as much as for the student. It is apparently all too easy to succumb to a particularly virulent form of narcissistic disorder when people are throwing rose petals at you all day. And when a teacher loses his bearings, the signs are hard to miss. As Tamm grew up and witnessed the guru’s increasingly erratic posturing (elaborate weightlifting hoaxes and an underground zoo of exotic animals were among his most b…