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Two Women and a Mosque: A Convert Community Grows in Panama City

By Aliyya Swaby

…mad Bhattay, one of its leaders. More than 500 people attend Friday prayer services every week, most of them Indian. But the number of Panamanian converts is rapidly growing. Bhattay said about two or three new converts come to Jama Mosque every week. Six months ago, the mosque began offering classes in Spanish — instead of just in Urdu — to accommodate the growing demand. There is no discrimination in the Muslim community in Panama City, Bhattay…

Lessons from the Defeat of the Oklahoma Personhood Bill

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…paint all pro-choice people with that brush.) The fact is, a whole lot of Americans find some abortions morally troubling, but are also troubled about the consequences of government intrusion into women’s reproductive decisionmaking. Which is a pretty nuanced way to look at, and it’s not one that is immediately friendly to personhood legislation. Secondly, it raises the question of whether we shall see a more general pushback against national gro…

Islamic Intellectual Leadership at a Crossroads

By Amina Wadud

…th, for both are part of my devotion to Allah). They do have a substantial number of women included, so I would not complain on that count. But, here’s the thing: there are no women under the category of Muslim intellectuals. Apparently women don’t think. So it is even harder to adjust to the loss of these three men whose intellectual contributions helped to shape the ways we think about and in fact live Islam today; both for women and for men. I…

Evangelical Pastor Argues for Full LGBT Inclusion: “I Think It’s Inevitable”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…sion of evangelicalism which will be inclusive of LGBT people. There are a number of evangelicals that are very open to this and are having the same experience I had of actually knowing gay and lesbian people, so I think it’s inevitable. I think there will be a sector of evangelicalism that will go past mainline protestant denominations, which have more institutional restraints. The more autonomous congregations will outpace them in acceptance. Th…

No Conspiracy Theories Needed: Abortion Foes Cry Racism

By Kathryn Joyce

…s among black women. Said Lusk, “When I began to consider that the African-American population alone has declined in the past three years across the nation, I realized that we’re not procreating our own race; and that is a direct result of abortion in our communities.” During this January’s annual March for Life, Alveda King led a group of demonstrators in laying thousands of roses on the White House lawn to symbolize African-American abortions as…

Religion and Other Animals

By Paul Waldau

…nimals than have children. Polls consistently indicate that an astonishing number of people—in some cases more than ninety-nine percent—hold their dog or cat to be a “family member.” Communities of faith are among the institutions that are most responsive to the complex connections between humans and other animals. One increasingly finds that contemporary religious communities have reinstituted the ancient practice known often as “blessing of the…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…ruption in our politics, and (most of all) the meek resignation with which Americans simply accept this state of affairs. The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream Chris Lehmann Melville House May 18, 2016 In my view, the greatest single virtue of Lehmann’s approach is his firm rejection of reductionism, his refusal to assume that Protestantism’s accommodation of the capitalist agenda has been purely reactive…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…ssed to you?” or “Nudity DOES NOT liberate me and I DO NOT need saving.” A number of commenters in the group, in fact, seem to think that Femen members are the ones who are oppressed. I myself have experienced these events as something of a roller coaster ride. As someone temperamentally shy about my body, I was both horrified and impressed first by Amina’s courageous statement, and later by the Femen protesters. But I also feared for their bodil…

Pope Denounces Gender Colonization; Indonesian Court Considers Islamist Request To Criminalize Homosexuality; Egypt’s Grand Mufti Says No One Has Right to Harm Homosexuals; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…d and beheaded, report AFP and the BBC: Cagil Kasapoglu of the BBC Turkish Service says hate crimes against LGBT individuals in Turkey mostly go unreported. According to kaosgl, there has been a rise in human rights violations based on sexual orientation in recent years. Under the heading “hate crimes” the organisation recorded five murders, 32 attacks and three suicides in Turkey last year. It believes the number of such murders over the past six…

‘Imagine Better’: Can Harry Potter Change the World?

By B. Howell Belser

…to date was HPA for the Win in June 2010, during which HPA mobilized huge numbers of online voters from across fandoms and online communities to win a $250,000 grant from the Chase Community Giving contest on Facebook. Then there’s the current “Deathly Hallows” campaign, which centers on the release date of a Harry Potter movie—in this case, The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 on Nov. 19. The Deathly Hallows campaign will run for nine months—the time bet…