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Growing Catholic Resistance to Bishops’ Crusades

By Peter Montgomery

…know that not everybody out there agrees with the bishops.” Pointing to a number of studies that show that about 90 percent of Catholics don’t follow the church’s official teaching on birth control, McCaulley said the group thought that since the bishop is “always willing to meet with priests,” they could raise the issue with Zubik and ask him to meet with laypeople, as “we didn’t feel competent to speak on women’s issues.” In Washington State, m…

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

…ian and gay pairs to adopt children as a couple.” Israel: Profile of trans servicemember In a week in which the US Defense Department said it is reversing a ban on transgender servicemembers, Karen Ocamb profiles the first openly transgender officer in the Israel Defense Forces. France: Pride parade cut in half due to security concerns Citing security concerns, police have cut in half the length of the Paris pride parade scheduled for Saturday, Ju…

Does God Want Jeremy Lin to Win?

By Jay Michaelson

…made into a figurehead, for religious people, and in Lin’s case, for Asian-Americans too. If Lin stumbles—if he gets into a fight in a bar, or behaves inappropriately with women, or commits any number of minor sins which ordinary people get away with every day—he lets down not only himself and his family, but his faith community and the Asian-American (and to some extent Asian) community as a whole, which currently views him as a hero. Can you ima…

Five Social Media Trends that are Reshaping Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…for the iPhone or iPad, and maybe 232 for the Android, it’s clear that the number of religiously-themed apps is growing. Apps are available for adherents to just about any religious group you can think of (including Pastafarians), and have been developed for a large number of congregations, dioceses, and other religious organizations (though it’s hard to know what one is meant to do with most of them). Prayer book apps, those for on-the-go spiritu…

No ‘Christian Compassion’ in Tony Perkins’ Response to Anti-Gay Bullying, Suicides

By Andrew Marin

…ges for the Kingdom. Reconciliation is a funny thing that takes shape in a number of forms within opposing communities. But one thing I know is true: it does not start or end with victory in mind. Reconciliation is best lived when Kingdom, on Earth as it is in Heaven, is the main goal of faithful establishment. I would remind Mr. Perkins to remember a few of Jesus’ direct words. First, in Matthew 22:18-22, Jesus reiterates to the religious gatekee…

The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

By Tony Keddie

…the fiddle while Rome burns—a fiery critique of him golfing while numerous Americans, especially poor and racially marginalized Americans—died from COVID-19. Reed couldn’t associate Trump with a notorious persecutor of Christians, so he opted for Tiberius instead. This is an undeniable historical error. I wonder if Reed’s appeal to Tiberius might even have been influenced by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s bestselling book, Killing Jesus (2013)….

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

By Peter Montgomery

…on democracy in Poland, in particular accusations it has politicized civil service, media and other areas of public life, while also undermining the Constitutional Tribunal. … In an open letter, the assembly of Catholic bishops in Poland asked Polish Catholics not to participate in the parade, claiming that advocating for LGBTQ issues was “falsifying the church’s unchangeable teaching.” AP reports that “several far-right nationalists tried to bloc…

Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…al urban economies—resulting in fewer resources for public schools, public services, and urban infrastructure. This exodus of resources from American cities and neighborhoods occurred against the backdrop of an ideological climate emphasizing public sphere fiscal austerity and balanced budgets, which compounded social resource scarcity for those most in need. What this large-scale flight of social resources left in its wake was not an urban demogr…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…them. That’s what severed the relationship. Academic Quality A surprising number of courses asked little more of students than to memorize Bible verses or learn basic details of biblical stories so that they could fill in the blanks on tests. Some made very questionable choices about the use of classroom time, such as the course that spent two days watching “the historic documentary Ancient Aliens,” which presents “a new interpretation of angelic…