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Indonesian Clerics Issue Anti-Gay Fatwa; Anti-Civil Union Peruvian Lawmaker Cites Hitler; Is Christianity more ‘un-African’ than Homosexuality?; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…mala, El Salvador and Honduras, where anti-LGBT violence is pervasive. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Turkey should not have forced a transgender man to get sterilized prior to being given access to transition-related surgery. More from the Advocate. IKEA announced it was shutting down its magazine in Russia to avoid violating the country’s anti-gay “propaganda” law. Designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabanna set off a social…

ISIS is the Islamic “Reformation”

By Ed Simon

…y wished to erase all vestiges of the past. For one versed in early modern European history the events of this past week in Mosul seem eerily familiar. On February 26th the Guardian reported that “Islamic State militants ransacked Mosul’s central museum, destroying priceless artefacts that are thousands of years old, in the group’s latest rampage…” As is the case in the Guardian‘s coverage, the story is often accompanied by Islamic State video sho…

Conservative Bishops Headed For Synod Victory?; Indonesian Sharia Official Says Gay Caning Law Meant To ‘Safeguard Human Dignity’; Slovenian Court OK’s Referendum on Marriage Equality Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…t legislation allowing gay marriage, an issue that has divided the central European nation.” More from AFP: The court’s decision comes after parliament in March adopted a bill giving same-sex couples the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples. A conservative group close to the centre-right opposition Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) and backed by the Catholic Church had contested the law. The group gathered enough signatures to trigger a ref…

Pat Robertson Warns Yoga Will Have You Speaking Hindu

By Andrea R. Jain

…w to the yogaphobic maelstrom that has been brewing for as long as Western Europeans and North Americans have been familiar with yoga. In the last couple of decades, largely in response to the widespread popularization of yoga, yogaphobia has shot to mainstream attention as socially conservative, high-profile Protestant evangelicals and Catholics have voiced unnerving warnings to Christians about how yoga threatens their religious commitments and…

Why Does the Pope Love This Trippy Dystopian Novel from 1907?

By Gordon Haber

The 2013 election of Pope Francis marked a number of firsts for the Catholic Church: the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, the first to have worked as a nightclub bouncer, and the first non-European to lead the church in 1200 years. He’s also the first pontiff to heartily recommend Lord of the World, Robert Hugh Benson’s trippy dystopian novel from 1907—a strange, intense and not entirely successful book about the rise of the anti-C…

Pope Backs Anti-Gay Referendum; Islamic State Executions Include Gay Syrian; ‘Conscience Clause’ Debated in Northern Ireland; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e success of a similar ballot measure in another Catholic-majority Eastern European country, Croatia, which adopted a ban on recognizing the marriages of same-sex couples in December. Read Feder’s article for a discussion of the Church’s involvement in raising funds for the referendum-backing Alliance for Family while publicly denying doing so. Some legal analysis of the referendum can be found here. The Advocate’s Stevie St. John reports on the L…

Why Serra Should Not Be a Saint

By Jacqueline M. Hidalgo

…tial saint because of his violent evangelism, but also because he became a European tool for the U.S. conquest of Californian territory—a means for ignoring the complex Mexican history of the U.S.’s most populous state. Perhaps for this reason, more than any other, California’s mission period is the last place we should look for saints; too much violent nationalism lies at the core of California mission memorialization to be of use to a global chu…

A Church With a Hole In Its Heart: An Excerpt from Peter Manseau’s “One Nation Under Gods”

By Peter Manseau

…their own notions of embodied divinity; it was holy even before the first Europeans looked on the people of an unmapped continent and declared that they must know nothing of God. Though it has a long and eclectic spiritual history, the hole sits today in the back corner of a Roman Catholic Church, El Santuario de Chimayo, which is among the most visited religious pilgrimage sites in America. Hundreds of thousands of true believers and curious sou…

‘Iconoclash’ of Civilizations: Missives from the Image Wars

By Eric M. Gurevitch

…y of long-suffering serenity and fortitude in the face of provocation. Yet European and American history are so strongly marked by efforts to control speech that the persecution of rebellious thought must be considered among the foundational buttresses of these societies. Witch burnings, heresy trials, and the untiring work of the Inquisition shaped Europe, and these ideas extended into American history and took on American modes, from the breakin…

Egyptian President Al-Sisi is a Dictator, Not a Reformer of Islam

By Mohamad Elmasry

It’s ironic that a number of (mostly right wing) commentators have been invoking the ideals of freedom of speech and expression while praising an authoritarian leader who has cracked down on these freedoms more than any of his nation’s authoritarian predecessors. American and European analysts on the right have called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi an Islamic “reformer” and an ally in the quest to deliver the message of Western freedom t…