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Indonesian Court Rejects Religious Conservatives’ Bid To Criminalize Gay Sex; More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…conflict and new social movement theory, we highlight four strategies that participants use to negotiate the dissonance of living with conflicting identities in a context of religious homophobia: (1) privileging their Islamic identities and rejecting homosexuality as a legitimate sexual identity; (2) rejecting Islam and accepting homosexuality as a legitimate sexual identity; (3) interpreting Islam to be supportive of homosexuality; and (4) creati…

Are You There God? It’s Us, Googling

By Michael Schulson

…ion in “Google searches for churches,” yet more evidence of the increasing number of “nones,” or that “searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere.” Other patterns are more jarring: “Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell,” he writes. Each month, on average, 422 people in th…

There’s Something Rotten in Ireland

By Haroon Moghul

…ring who it is being directed to and where it is apparently originating. A number of Palestinians are Christians, and that Christianity is of course traced back to the time of Jesus himself. The Palestinian weekend is Friday and Sunday. In addition to being the world’s most annoying and dissatisfying weekend schedule (there should be an award for that, or maybe financial compensation), the days reflect the primary religious affiliations of Palesti…

A Debate Rages in India Over Conversion, Secularism, and “Spiritual Violence”

By Murali Balaji

…as its ramifications beyond the country’s borders. As Pawan Deshpande and Padma Kuppa note, the discussion about ghar wapsi should be broadened to include the international implications of conversion politics in India. If evangelical groups are spending millions a year in coercively converting Indians (including right after natural disasters like the 2004 tsunami), then we should be having a discussion about the scale of conversion and the impact…

False Saviors: Trump, Cruz, and the Gospel of the Quick Fix

By Marcia Pally

…for grand, sweeping relief from legitimate problems is not new: one finds parallels in the appeal of fascism in Weimar Germany, crippled by war reparations, sky-rocketing inflation, and an economy in free-fall. Or in the appeal of ISIS: people suffering economic free-fall and dictatorial suppression or, in the developed world, inadequate education and prejudice. Alienation is the equal opportunity killer, reaching even those who have productive f…

And What of the Non-Jewish Jews?

By Shaul Magid

…d where very recently being “Jewish” was a liability and anti-semitism was palpable, the number of non-Jews today who identify as Jewish seems historically distinctive. We could, perhaps, point to the so-called “fearers of heaven,” an undocumented community of Hellenes in late antiquity who lived in large Jewish population centers, apparently lived partially as Jews, and had some status in the Jewish community. But today’s non-Jewish Jews aren’t i…

Not a ‘Weenie-A** Lodge’: James Ray Trial Begins

By Johnny P. Flynn

…to say on the tapes, a statement he apparently held fast to as one participant passed out and fell and burned his arm on the red-hot stones. Ray asked him to come back into the lodge to finish the sweat. The trial finished its first week on Friday in Arizona’s Yavapai County. Ray is facing three counts of manslaughter and more than thirty years in prison for allegedly causing the deaths of Kirby Brown, James Shore, and Liz Neuman in an October 20…

Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

By Grant Gallicho

…iocesan review board chairs, conducted by the National Review Board, where participants could share best practices? In addition, bishops need to meet with their review boards on a regular basis. Many bishops do, but not all. In the Diocese of Gallup, New Mexico, for example, the chair of the review board recently admitted that the bishop has never met with the board. The relationship between a review board and the bishop should not be adversarial…

First U.S. Visit of the Virgin Mary Confirmed in Wisconsin

By Lewis Wallace

…nonized are not big-shot Mother Theresa types, but local heroes, many from past centuries. That’s why, for the most part, you’ve never heard of them. Bishops, archbishops and the Vatican do serve as arbiters of hundreds of sightings and miracles each year, addressing and mediating a steady stream of beliefs that arise around the world. Since the creation of new criteria for Marian apparitions in 1978, hundreds of sightings have been studied, and a…

Are Conservative Churches Really Winning by Being More Orthodox?

By Daniel Schultz

…igrant groups (especially Hispanics) that has propped the Church up in the past forty years. Hispanic Catholics have a high fertility rate (2.75 children per couple), second only to Muslims in the U.S. Non-Hispanic Catholics (2.11 children), meanwhile, look a lot like moderate Protestants (2.01) and liberal Protestants (1.84). Here’s the kicker: Catholics are overrepresented among immigrants—again, especially Hispanics—who still account for a disp…