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Can Eurovision’s Rainbow Arch Undermine Ukraine’s Orthodox Value System? This and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…s long-cherished in the West. Yet beneath the liberal facade put on by the city, which wants fans at Saturday’s final to celebrate “our unique differences,” resentment and anger has brewed among thuggish far-right groups and powerful clerics who treat homosexuals with disdain. And while the Kyiv Pride LGBT rights group distributes maps of gay-friendly places tucked in the shadow of Orthodox churches, beatings of homosexuals are routine and even th…

Searching for Moral High Ground While Houston Drowns: A Perspective on the Lakewood Church Controversy

By Joshua L. Lazard

…ees arriving, as the downtown George R. Brown Convention Center was at capacity. In a city with dozens and dozens of churches, some quite large, why was Osteen and Lakewood Church singled out in such a prominent way? It seems as though every negative assumption about organized religion and preachers—right or wrong—was projected onto Osteen. Likewise, every cynical opinion about megachurches and their members were flattened and placed on Lakewood….

Dispatches From the Site of a Massacre

By Haroon Moghul

…n paramilitaries stormed Srebrenica and killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys—a city the U.N. had previously declared a safe haven. This past May, I led a group of nearly fifty people on a tour of Spain’s Muslim heritage. The experience was wonderful—Spaniards were warm and their country was breathtakingly beautiful. But it was unnerving to see centuries of an Iberian history dismissed largely because it was guilty of sharing my faith. Take, for exampl…

Getting Back into Blogging

By Amina Wadud

…them. In the dream, one of the members of my tour group lands in the holy city with an inflatable Eiffel tower. That’s how I knew it was partially about the hajj. My flight itinerary is set. I fly directly from San Francisco to Paris, and then from Paris to Jeddah, which is like the port city for hajjis. Apparently in the dream, someone was so anxious to show they had gone through Paris, they sort of took anything—because, clearly in the dream, n…

Mormon Leader: ‘I’m Sorry’ For Hurtful Legacy of Prop. 8

By Joanna Brooks

…d and took notes to share with other General Authorities back in Salt Lake City. At the conclusion of the hour, he apologized for the pain he was witnessing. According to attendee Carol Lynn Pearson, a Mormon author and longtime advocate of LGBT concerns, Elder Jensen said, “To the full extent of my capacity, I say that I am sorry… I know that many very good people have been deeply hurt, and I know that the Lord expects better of us.” An apology….

Seven-in-Heaven Way, Hybrid Pope, & “Chrislam”

By Michael J. Altman

…e Latter-day Saints are launching a million-dollar ad campaign in New York City. While the Crystal Cathedral has fallen on hard times, its Spanish language service is booming. A Malaysian reality show searches for the best preaching Muslim woman. In Tajikistan, the parliament is considering a bill to keep kids out of churches and mosques. Secularism is on the way out in Bangladesh. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has expelled a senior member for…

‘Murder Among the Mormons’ Ep 1 Recap: A Trio of Bombs Launches SLC into a Panic

By Benjamin E. Park

…ruggles to produce the complete “McLellin Papers,” which he had promised a number of Mormon collectors, left him scrambling. News clips from those long October days captured the heightened animosity after a first death, and then a second, launched Salt Lake City into a panic. The episode ends with the dramatic climax of policemen, journalists, and friends alike terrified that they had a serial killer running loose. In his Bancroft Prize-winning bo…

Savoring the Haterade: Why Jews Love Dara Horn’s ‘People Love Dead Jews’

By Shaul Magid

…g that all peoples share, from Russia to America, from Manchuria to Jersey City, is that they love dead Jews. Dead Jews is the subject of the book; not, mind you, antisemitism, but literally: dead Jews. That seems to be for Horn the common denominator of human civilization. Of course, this book is written by a person with the best education in the world, in a free country where her Jewishness is not only protected, but where the president just app…

Gay Chutzpah: An LGBT Synagogue Thrives

By Susan Henking

In 1973, a group of Jewish gay people—mostly men—gathered in New York City and created what eventually became Congregation Beit Simchat Torah. In the decades since then, the organization has burgeoned, and been a leader both within Judaism and within the LGBTQ movement. The congregation is also known to some—perhaps many—because of an ethnography undertaken by an Israeli anthropologist who specialized in migration, but became intrigued with the c…

Mike Lee Wins Utah Senate Primary

By Joanna Brooks

…water’s endorsements by outgoing incumbent Senator Bob Bennett and the big-city Salt Lake Tribune. And they effectively capitalized on Lee’s background as a constitutional scholar, appealing to deeply-held Mormon reverence for the divine origins and latter-day imperilment of the US Constitution. (Someone even made a YouTube video morphing LDS Church founder Joseph Smith’s face into Mike Lee’s.) Lee won in areas strongly hooked into the mainstream…