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Black Women and the Sacred: With “Lemonade,” Beyoncé Takes Us to Church

By Yolanda Pierce

…its unapologetic focus on black women “Lemonade” is equal parts “testimony service” and Sunday morning worship. It celebrates beauty and resiliency, as any good, uplifting worship service in the African-American Christian tradition should do. But the visual album doesn’t shy away from the trials and pains experienced by those women who may not get a chance to speak or to lead on Sunday morning, but who testify about their lives on a Wednesday or F…

Do Evangelicals Oppose Syria Intervention?

By Stephen V. Anderson

…only those, on the Board of Directors of the NAE—a board with a little over 100 members. (The 62.5% – 37.5% split suggest, assuming no rounding, that 40, or a multiple thereof, board members chose to respond.) Neither Southern Baptist Convention president Fred Luter Jr., nor the head of its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Russell Moore, were included, and the SBC has nearly 16 million members. Other influential evangelicals who aren’t NA…

Navy Yard Shooting: Why It’s Not a Religion Story

By Michael Jerryson

…2011 that there were wide-sweeping cuts across the nation to mental health services. Just recently, the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA) announced that New York governor Andrew Cuomo planned to close psychiatric services, including the planned 2017 closure of the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center in New Hampton. We should indeed be obsessed with ending gun violence; we should also be deeply concerned about how we as a society take c…

Australian Church Nixes Straight Couple’s Wedding Over Their Marriage Equality Support; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…olic church, will not marry someone who has married before.” According to Fairfax, the couple, who had attended the church for 10 years, told North his decision was “disgraceful”. “You were made aware from the beginning of our proceedings that we had gay friends and also that people in our wedding party were gay. How could you assume that we would abandon them or degrade them with regards to same-sex marriage?” The Guardian notes that the Presbyte…

Why the Women’s Ordination Question Will Shape the Future of Mormonism

By Joanna Brooks

…” and that Mormon women once exercised a fuller range of institutional and spiritual powers than they do now. Historians have also shown that the now frequently cited rationale of “complementarity”—priesthood for men, motherhood for women–only entered LDS discourse in the 1930s and without basis in Mormon history, liturgy, ritual, or scripture. Nor does the still-cited rationale of gender-segregated “complementarity” reflect the increasingly div…

Meet the Real Mitt Romney

By Joanna Brooks

The Sunday New York Times‘s front-page story on Mitt Romney’s service as a Mormon lay pastoral leader is hands down the most humanizing profile of candidate Romney that I’ve yet seen. And it makes a substantial contribution towards improving a national conversation about Mormonism that continues to fixate on caricatures and pejoratives. (A week after Pastor Robert Jeffress went on a media-spree hurling the pejorative term “cult” at millions of Am…

Rolling the Stone Away: LGBTQI Elders Meet the Next Generation of Christian Activists at a Watershed Conference

By Mary E. Hunt

…r discrimination that the churches generated over several millennia. By the 1970s and 1980s, the scandal of Christian ignorance unto injustice on same-sex everything became too obvious to ignore. Exclusion of qualified candidates from ordination, the spread of theological pornography like “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” (From the Congregation on the Doctrine of the Faith, Persona humana 8), and insulting anti-queer preaching led cou…

A Catholic House Divided Over Reproductive Health Care: Bishops Launch a New Campaign

By Frances Kissling

…ows full well that opposition to providing contraceptive and sterilization services is not the same as insuring those services, has joined the bishops in this fight. More importantly, it remains to be seen whether the Obama administration will understand that it is quite possible that many Catholic hospitals would have no moral problem covering their employees for contraceptive services should the administration stand firm. Some may in fact ferven…

Identity Theology: Political Correctness with a Halo

By Carlos Wilton

…ay not categorically bar women from ordained service. In fact, The church’s 1990 Brief Statement of Faith declares that “the Spirit… calls women and men to all ministries of the Church,” elevating the ordination of women to confessional status. By contrast, when the PCUSA’s General Assembly voted to begin ordaining LGBTQ people several years ago, it spoke of the need to maintain safe spaces for conservative dissenters who believe scripture prevent…

New Mag Provides a Platform for Christians of Color

By Anita Little

…r there. Out of the 200 that were probably there, I could have counted the number of reporters of color on one or two hands. That says something to me. I don’t think it’s anything intentional, but there’s something missing there. Of course, we always come back to the question, “Well, are there people of color pursuing journalism as a profession? Are they pursuing religion reporting as a profession?” That’s a fair question to ask as well. Instituti…