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New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

…ouse, and his colleague, Rob Tisinai, gives a better breakdown of what the numbers really mean—and it isn’t a rousing success story about “change.” “Out of 98 highly-motivated subjects, the authors found that a small, unspecified number can use prayer and counseling to shut down their sexual feelings or become a bit more bi. And possibly none who turned straight.” Even the researchers call their conclusions “overly optimistic.” “These results do n…

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“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

…notion that pregnancy is not an illness draws, I daresay uneasily, from a number of sources. There’s the classical notion that a thing’s nature is derived from its purpose, and the purpose of female bodies is to bear children. There’s the persistent early modern fear that women, especially privileged white women, are becoming overcivilized and unnatural, not having as many privileged white babies, relying on technology and pain relief, and not fi…

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Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

…ving those relationships may be a good and worthy goal, and I spoke with a number of ex-gay men who spoke of the gifts that pursuing their heterosexual marital relationships gave. But this is not a change in sexual orientation; it is making one particular heterosexual relationship work. Homo-Intimacy The other element in Wyler’s story, one that is common in many ex-gay change narratives, is the centrality of male intimacy in the process of orienta…

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Change v. Change at NPR

…ebate but it is between the mental health establishment and a much smaller number of traditionally minded religious therapists. However, even if Spiegel had correctly identified the nature and participants in the debate, she still would not have gotten it quite right. To his credit, Schumacher-Matos does a better job when he reviews material given to him by Spiegel and her editor Anne Gudenkauf. Among other things, Schumacher-Matos read an article…

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Dispatch from Charlottesville: “It Was a War Zone. It Felt Like There Were a Million Nazis.”

…counter-protestors. That’s an exaggeration, but I’m just saying, that the number of nazis compared to counter-protestors was unreal. I’m just like, where in the hell did all these people come from? They took over the fucking city. So as things were heating up, we saw riot gear enter into our barricade, where we had been secured. And it was advised to leave that location and go to a secure location. And so, at that point we left that barricade and…

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American Christianity Is Changing Fast: Five Stories to Watch in 2016

…ken a much more adversarial stance to LGBT acceptance. However, increasing numbers of evangelical churches are accepting LGBT individuals as members. This development is not without its opponents, however. Many evangelical organizations—most significantly colleges, universities and seminaries—are mobilizing to retain their “religious right” to discriminate against LGBT individuals. More than 30 evangelical higher education institutions have petiti…

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The Faith Outreach Canard

…Eleison Group, who the RNS article notes worked doing faith outreach on a number of Democratic campaigns in 2006 and 2008 but not in 2010. In both the RNS interview and in an article on Huffington Post, Sapp argues for a causal link between lackluster faith outreach in this election cycle and Democratic losses; his conclusion: “the results were disastrous.” To support this argument, Sapp claims the following: Compared to ’06, Democrats nationally…

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Loving Uganda to Death: The Global Reach of Far-Right Christian Hatred

…es—affirming and not—have inquired about holding screenings and hopes that number will continue to grow. He believes that seeing and hearing these stories can change people’s hearts. He says he was changed in the process of making the movie; getting to know some of the missionaries and IHOP staff as people made it harder to think of them as simply “evil fundamentalists.” And, he says, that after spending so much time with missionary Joanna Watson,…

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Top Five (Less Sensational, But More Dangerous) Things to Remember About Pat Robertson (1930-2023)

…hment from God for Satanism—the same episode that Chrissy Stroop ranked as number one on her own top 10 list, and a worthy contender, no doubt! But since Robertson liked to say outrageous things like this on a regular basis, I created a list more attuned to underlying structural aspects of his resume: less about preposterous provocations and more about his work as a cog in the everyday banality of evil in the Republican coalition. It’s interesting…

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Haiti and the Push for Theological Questions

…nine on the Richter scale. It devastated the population. Estimates of the number of people killed range from 10,000 to 100,000. At the time the quake struck, worshipers filled the churches honoring their dead. The churches, the worshippers, and the city around them were effectively destroyed. Not long after the major quake hit, a tsunami followed that killed those who had rushed to the beaches in fear to avoid the havoc of the earthquake. The cat…

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