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UN Human Rights Council Creates LGBT Watchdog; Orthodox Council Affirms Traditional Teaching on Family; Pope Francis Says Church Should Apologize to Gays; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e the vote, anti-LGBT activist Austin Ruse had warned supporters: A major catastrophe is about to happen at UN Headquarters in Geneva. The sexual revolutionaries are about to defeat the forces of truth and goodness. It has been the long-term project of the sexual revolutionaries to undermine the teachings of the Church and to impose a new sexual orthodoxy on the whole world. The new sexual orthodoxy is nothing more than a new religion celebrating…

Show Me the Way of the Hebrews: The Making of an African American Rabbi

By J. Lester Feder

…nded almost like mullahs chanting the Koran, while others sang with an extravagant Ashkenazi style that I had only seen used by Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. I was at Bethel on an assignment for The Washington Post, a cover story for the magazine about a new African American synagogue in DC started in 2008 by Mother Dailey’s grandson, Eli Aronoff. (Aronoff claims no Ashkenazi ancestry despite his surname—his father was from rural South Carolina.)…

A Post-Christian America? Not Quite—Though Devoutly to be Wished

By Peter Laarman

…an, the amiable and well-informed Meacham said what I would have said: on balance, it’s a good thing that the various and dangerous forms of grievance associated with “Christian nation” thinking should now recede. It’s a good thing that more have come to appreciate the wisdom of separating church and state. And yet I’m not sure the road ahead is completely sunny. This morning I awoke with two thoughts in relation to Meacham’s piece: 1) There’s got…

An Extravagant Welcome For All: Believe Out Loud, a Faith-Based LGBT Campaign, Launches

By Peter Laarman

…and Values program for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) says that she has “watched the Believe Out Loud campaign emerge step by step over the course of three years—and I know the expectations are high for the Valentine’s Day launch. We all know this campaign won’t translate into instant success,” Craig adds, “but when people of faith do in fact declare out loud that all people are equal before God, I am convinced that more…

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…n to its knees The thing is, we do know what’s going on, but too few seem capable of saying it. We now have a fair number of political and civic leaders who are willing to say the word trauma and talk about the all-pervasive violence in this culture, not to mention the extent of mental disturbance and the fact that American civilians have more assault rifles in their possession than does the U.S. military. All well and good. But we have too few le…

Life as a Game Show: Reading Slumdog Millionaire

By Paul Courtright

…is nominated for 10 Oscars (including Best Picture) and already boasts 60 awards from various academies and guilds. European and American audiences have embraced it, though Indian viewers—in India and abroad—have had a more ambivalent response. Some celebrate the film as a long-overdue recognition of Indian cinema, while others found that the attention to Mumbai’s slums and underworld merely reinscribes a cartoonish representation of India as a l…

Catholic Leaders Offer Criticism, Support to Boxer Pacquiao After Anti-Gay Comments…

By Peter Montgomery

…cials Continue Anti-LGBT Campaigns Indonesia has been making a regular appearance in this recap, with a wave of homophobic rhetoric from religious and political officials. That wave continued this week, as Lester Feder and Rin Hindryati report at BuzzFeed. Last Friday, the former Information and Communications Minister Tifatul Semberling, currently a member of Parliament from the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party, tweeted that the Prophet Mohammed…

The Abortion Debate, Texas Style

By Dhawn Martin

…day’s official proceedings, tears and confessions, facts and statistics, blatant propaganda and earnest pleas, punctuated testimonies offered on both sides of the bill. Unofficial proceedings turned the Capitol’s open-air rotunda into a public forum. One activist pronounced pro-life the “truly Christian” stance; another expressed dismay that “‘they’ always paint ‘us’ as godless.” All the while a man walked about the rotunda bearing a notebook-size…

The Fretting About Whether Democrats Are “Friendly” To Religion

By Sarah Posner

…the health care bill. From Pew: After peaking at 38% in mid-2008 during Obama’s presidential election campaign, the number of Americans describing the Democratic Party as friendly toward religion returned in mid-2009 to levels similar to those seen in 2005 through 2007. About one-in-five say Democrats are unfriendly toward religion (22%), up from 15% who felt that way last year but about the same as in surveys conducted in 2005 and 2006. Views of…

Demonized and Demonizing No More.

By Joanna Brooks

…ctive and compassionate discourse, and so I wanted to model that by moving away from talking about these issues in a theoretical way and grounding them in real-world experiences. What’s been the reaction to your work? When the book first came out, there were some early negative responses—from atheists in particular. As time has gone on, I have been able to see my book and the response to it as part of thriving and ultimately heartening conversatio…