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#SorryNotSorry: What U.S. Christian Denominations Teach About Homosexuality

The massacre of 49 individuals in an Orlando gay nightclub on June 12 has ignited a fierce and ongoing public debate about whether anti-LGBT laws and rhetoric lead to violence. Yesterday’s New York Times lists some of the more horrific statements made by Christian pastors, like Tempe, Arizona’s Steven L. Anderson, whose only objection to the tragedy was that “they should have been executed by a righteous government.” Both conservative religious f…

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An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?)   The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…

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Burying the Future: Youth Violence in Chicago

…Walcott Avenue to be exact). It’s become a statistic to keep track of: the number of school-age children who are murdered, sometimes on school grounds, during a school year, which means the academic year is properly hyphenated. The punctuation gives bone to the unholy facts, but it also creates another set of suburban record-keeping to conjure with. In other words, it makes the reality more abstract, a bit easier to study as citizens. I teach in D…

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Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…

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Religious Affiliation, ‘Mankind’: India’s Anti-Corruption Activist Leads Second Freedom Struggle

…good move. When I got to the lobby another something told me to dig out my phone and check it for messages. Sure enough, I had one from an unfamiliar number. A woman’s voice said Bedi was still sleeping, exhausted from the previous day’s overseas flight, and needed to reschedule our interview for that afternoon. I called the number back, convinced the opportunity was lost. “I’m here at the hotel now, but I’m booked solid this afternoon—” “Hold on,…

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Reporting from Paris: A Prayer for Polluters

…was powerfully reminded of the United Church of Christ Synod last July in Cleveland, where a caucus proposed a stop fracking resolution. We spent hours on national phone calls debating when fracking should be stopped. We finally proposed 2030 as the last fracking date. It was a compromise after many “brackets,” what COP21 calls the matters that are kept in that famous parking lot where we put the things we don’t know how to decide. The Synod amen…

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400 Churchgoing Mormons March in SLC Pride Parade

…ormons Building Bridges delegation offered an opening prayer through a megaphone. Then, the LDS contingent took its assigned place at the head of the parade and began to march. Some Bridges marchers worried how the crowds would react, especially given the history of LDS Church-backed opposition to same-sex marriage. “But when we turned the first corner onto 200 South Street, the crowd just roared,” says Austin Hollinbaugh, a recent BYU graduate fr…

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Where’s Wallnau? A NAR Apostle Takes Aim at Swing Counties in ‘The Battle for the Mountain of Government’

…apps” including As One America, which contains the name, address and phone number of Christian neighbors “who are not showing up to vote or who are not registered.” He then showed a map with big red arrows pointing to precincts “within striking distance” from Vida Church to the precincts that are “where the devil’s got a stronghold that God wants to break up.” The app was developed by Superfeed Technologies, which has also designed apps for such c…

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Are We Living Through World War III?

…t worse. We’re in the middle of a Third World War. In last week’s column, “Orlando and Trump’s America,” Roger Cohen tries to predict the consequences of Omar Mateen’s nightclub attack. He fears Mateen’s massacre “just ushered Donald Trump to the White House, Britain out of the European Union, Marine Le Pen to the French presidency, and the world into a downward spiral of escalating violence.” Omar Mateen, Cohen argues, is the 21st century’s Gavri…

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Gimme Shelter: Queer Space Is Sanctuary

…When violence enters a sanctuary, that is a violation of sacred space. The phones of the dead at Pulse continued to ring for hours as those who loved them frantically dialed and re-dialed, hoping to find them alive. Violence tore open the sanctuary throughout history, tore it open over and over again. Violence brought queers into the streets of Orlando to hold one another and weep, brought queers into the streets to riot at Stonewall, brought peop…

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