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Too Hot for Shul: Rabbis Seek Healthy Israel Dialogue After Gaza

By Sarah Posner

…ger chilling effect in the American Jewish world, yes; I’ve gotten so many phone calls and voicemails [from people] who have had something happen to them—this summer I do believe it has gone off the rails.” Yet, Kleinbaum said, “I do think my job is to create a Jewish space in which this discussion can take place without saying this person is not a good Jew and another is a good Jew. That, I think, is a reachable goal for my community.” Many rabbi…

Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…ader. What was the culture of the prison? At night, there was one guard for 800 prisoners. In the Rio prison system there’s no real government presence; state control in the prisons is just a façade. The prison gangs are the most powerful presence, but the church exerts a strong influence too. There were about 400 inmates in the gang camp inside the prison, and 40 to 50 in the church camp. The rest were neutral people who kept to themselves in the…

Hajj Journal: M & M

By Amina Wadud

…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…

Another Important Defection From the Russian Patriarchate Looms — The Fate of Orthodoxy in the West Hangs in the Balance

By Katherine Kelaidis

…ultural situation as St. Nicholas in Amsterdam, the famed Russian Orthodox parish that broke away from Moscow last month after its pleas to Patriarch Kirill to end the violence in Ukraine were met with retaliation, both online and in real life. It’s worth noting that St. Sergius has only recently become part of the Moscow Patriarchate. For most of its history, until 2018, it was under Constantinople, when it was handed over to Moscow as a (clearly…

Australians Vote Overwhelmingly For Marriage Equality; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…the right to be married or adopt a child. The Catholic Church praised the ruling as “wise.” China: Report exposes use of drugs, electroshock as part of ‘conversion therapy’ BBC reports on a Human Rights Watch study of forced “conversion therapy” involving drugs and electroshock treatment. France: Paris moves to create LGBT movement archive The Paris city council is planning to open an archive to “preserve documentation of the LGBT movement in Fra…

“Love Them As Yourself”: God’s Words or IKEA Instructions?

By Marcia Pally

Since the Paris attacks, the right’s response to refugees crisis has been martial: we’re at war; keep them out. The counter-response is that we’re morally bound to admit and help them. But what precisely is the moral and religious claim? And what are the possible outcomes if we do or don’t follow it? Most of the Republican candidates would refuse to admit refugees as would 30 governors. Ben Carson compared them to “rabid dogs.” Jeb Bush would adm…

Burma’s Spirit Festival, and More in This Week’s Global LGBT Roundup

By Peter Montgomery

…of blue blazers or silk scarves) does not feel strange. In Germany, by comparison, the main Christian chuches (Lutheran and Catholic) have a privileged position. Although their membership is dwindling, as recently released figures confirm, they still haul in taxes from tens of millions of citizens under a system overseen by the state. Within most German federal states, the churches have an entrenched position as advisers on education and, sometim…

Does Violence Always Win?: Learning From René Girard (1923-2015)

By Martha J. Reineke

…grants. When the House of Representatives subsequently voted in veto-proof numbers to effectively close US borders to Syrian immigrants, Christie and Carson’s fears were enshrined in the political mainstream. Days before the Paris attacks, on November 4, 2015, René Girard died in Palo Alto, CA at age 91. In the wake of ISIS panic that ensued after the attacks, Girard’s legacy –a lifetime of writing on violence, religion, and the human condition—ha…

A Brief History of Olympic Flames

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…the hip (in the ancient and the modern Olympics, alike), eruptions of the Parisian and Californian sort we’ve seen over the past few days are bound to recur. One thinks of the African-American protests in 1968 (and we tend to forget the hundreds of nonviolent protestors killed by government forces just weeks before the Mexico City Games began). We think of boycotts in Moscow in 1980, and Los Angeles in 1984, and the debates roiling as we speak. T…

Papal Profanity: The Vatican’s Pagan Museum

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…eaty in which 100 works of art were explicitly listed for expropriation to Paris. By the end of their 20-year sojourn in Paris, the Laocoön Group and Apollo Belvedere had inspired an explosion of new museum construction throughout Europe. As I’ve said before, new ways of seeing emerge with surprising suddenness in the modern period. Instituting those new ways of seeing was very much what modern museums were designed to do. So a pagan idol become…