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Rome Has Spoken and Rome Is Finished: The Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit ‘Failed Miserably’

By Mary E. Hunt

…ed minors and some covered it up. What’s so mysterious about that? A large number of minors have been sexually abused by a large number of clerics. Period. Full stop. It’s simply the beginning of a hideous story that includes the abuse of seminarians, nuns and other women, children of priests, and more, all of whom merit summits of their own. Francis’ discussion of power fell flat. He claimed that the sexual abuse of minors is an abuse of power. H…

How Not To Defend Atheism

By Vlad Chituc

…llion atheists in the U.S., a full 26% of the country. The most charitable number I could find was from Gallup, putting the number of Americans in 2014 who say they don’t believe in God at 11%. To make things frustratingly worse, other atheists have been calling Silverman out for falsely inflating the number of atheists for more than four years. And last year, I specifically asked Silverman if he would stop reporting the stats on “nones” as being…

Religion Round-Up: What’s Going on in Religion Around the World

By Diane Winston

…are, according to Pew, surprisingly high. Moreover, they represent a large number of people, “nearly equal the estimated number of religiously affiliated adults in the United States” Accordingly, the 1-plus % of the Chinese population that identifies itself as Muslim equals some 20.3 million people—a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia’s. (More to the point, as one of China’s ethnic minorities, Muslims are not bound to the one-child per fam…

How a Powerful ‘Ex-Gay’ Pastor is Chasing the Latino Vote

By Katherine Stewart

…ic and Pentecostal vein, and these are explicitly multiracial movements. A number of the more farsighted leaders are therefore making a conscious effort to include and empower nonwhite individuals and groups. At the very least, they are doing what they can to collect their votes. Jim Domen is one such leader. A California pastor and the founder of a group called Church United, he has built his voter-outreach machine around the idea of racial inclu…

Unprecedented Anti-LGBTQ Statement By Orthodox Church in America Should Be Christian Nationalist Warning Sign to US Orthodoxy

By Katherine Kelaidis

…e 1980s, American Orthodoxy was, almost exclusively, a religious tradition composed of immigrants and their descendants. However, beginning in the 1980s, there were an increasing number of converts to Orthodoxy, many of whom (though notably and importantly not all) came as refugees from debates of gender and sexuality in their own denominations—debates they had lost. These conversions have been a major catalyst in the transformation of the politic…

A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

…CA has taken its stand for justice and has given every indication of being committed to that stand, come whatever may. Additionally, the church has repeatedly insisted that it will respect the “bound conscience” of dissenters and will work to continue in faithful and productive mission and ministry with those who disagree with the actions taken at the 2009 churchwide assembly. Already, though, there are signs of pressure to rescind the decisions m…

Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

By Peter Laarman

…are winning in state after state. In the past six years, we’ve doubled the number of private school choice programs to 50, the number of private school choice states to 25, plus Washington, D.C., and doubled the number of students currently benefiting from private school choice to 400,000. All told, together, we’ve helped more than a million kids in private school choice programs, and we’re just getting started. “Just getting started”: we should n…

“I Speak to God in Public”: Are Young Black Millennials Reclaiming a Theology of Resistance?

By Joshua L. Lazard

…filiation. Only among historically black Protestant denominations did that number trend downward significantly between 2007 and 2014; the 18-29 age group decreased from 24 to 20 percent among historically black Protestant denominations. The number of 18-29 year olds among Catholics and evangelical Protestants ticked up 1 percent respectively, and among mainline Protestants it saw a 9 percent increase. In the interest of equity, blacks make up 9 pe…

Can Mormon Glenn Beck Unite the Christian Right?

By Kathryn Joyce

…f the Illinois-based Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, is a compelling conservative historian who uses secular arguments to advance religious right ideas. A chief example of this is “The Natural Family Manifesto,” a guiding document of the WCF community, co-written by Carlson and Paul Mero, head of the Mormon think tank the Sutherland Institute. The ecumenical call to arms extols a conservative lifestyle where fathers lead and women…

What Fidel Castro’s Death Means for LGBT Rights in Cuba and More, in This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…pport them in their spiritual lives by seeing that the three pillars of welcome, safety and inclusion are implanted in the Church. “These issues are complicated. Churches find the matter toxic and are, just like political parties, afraid of splits. Other Churches here have networks supporting LGBT members and these have been successful to the degree that these Churches are no longer talking ‘into themselves’, but tentatively finding ways to dialog…