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Conservative Republican Muslim Condemns Fox Report on Congressional Staffers as “Anti-Muslim Bigotry”

By Sarah Posner

…approached then-Speaker Newt Gingrich about obtaining a room for the small number of Muslim staffers to hold Friday prayers. Gingrinch granted that request, and the tradition continued through the tenures of Speakers Dennis Hastert, also a Republican, and Nancy Pelosi. Over the years, the number of people attending grew, eventually leading to the creation of the CMSA around 2007, when Khan has already left Hill service and was working in the Bush…

The Internet Is Not Killing Religion, Religion is Killing Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…data on the correlation between the number of pipers in a village and the number of butts in local church pews. Across the pond in the American colonies, religion was not faring much better. In his masterful reconstruction of American religious history, Awash in a Sea of Faith (from which the previous anecdote is drawn), Jon Butler reports that Christianity was “in crisis” in the New World: Pennsylvania aside, the Restoration colonies of New York…

Why Even Progressive Christianity Must Own Its Complicity in Anti-LGBT Violence

By Layton E. Williams

…ian churches and leaders—has led to countless hate crimes, alarmingly high numbers of homeless LGBT young people, and staggering rates of depression, self-harm, and suicide among LGBT youth and adults. Of course, a growing number of churches and denominations today have rejected such a destructive understanding of human sexuality. Religion Dispatches recently compiled a list of the official positions on LGBT issues currently taught by various Chri…

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

By B. Howell Belser

…, and the power of imagination and storytelling to inspire young people to care about the world and to be engaged in its development. In her 2008 Harvard commencement speech, Rowling reminded us that “We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.” This is the message at the heart of the Harry Potter Alliance. I am not sure how long the story of Harry Potter w…

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

…urders, 32 attacks and three suicides in Turkey last year. It believes the number of such murders over the past six years is more than 50. Syrian gay refugees in Turkey suffer even more, as their legal status is precarious – they are usually undocumented and most are reluctant to report assaults to police, our reporter says. The Turkish authorities cited “safeguarding security and public order” as the reason for banning Gay Pride in Istanbul this…

Is Army’s New “Humanist” Designation Just Semantic Hooey?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…plains approved for military service, though MAAF reports that there are a number of Atheist and Humanist chaplain assistants. The DOD’s ruling this week may, thus, have a meaningful impact on the free expression of religious identity for the reported 3.6% of service members who are Humanists and allow more diverse access to resources for spiritual care and the development of communities of support. While the decision certainly reflects growth i…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…ld soon be feeling the need to leave her home country. Not surprisingly, a number of Western women felt moved to show their support for Amina. An international movement called Femen staged bare-breasted protests in European cities, in which the writings on their chests echoed Amina’s, along with “Freedom for women” and “Fuck your morals.” (Be warned: photos contain nudity and strong language.) But Femen did not have the last word. Almost immediat…

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…mingly Catholic country with a dominant Spanish influence. With a dizzying number of languages, economic classes, ethnicities and cultures represented in American Catholic churches, American Catholics resist singularity. And it follows that they are going to be inconsistent in how they define mercy, as the hierarchy of the American church is often wont to demonstrate. Even the variety of American “Mercy Doors” found online defies comparison to the…

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

By Peter Laarman

…delights in surfacing little-known factoids. These include the remarkable number of commercial hucksters who were preachers or else preachers’ kids (e.g., Richard Bolles of What Color is Your Parachute? fame—a former Episcopal priest) and the equally remarkable number of notable preachers who had strong commercial instincts and/or commercial roots (ranging from 18th-century superstar evangelist George Whitefield to 19th-century revivalist giant C…

‘Cult’ Is an Inaccurate, Unhelpful and Dangerous Label for Followers of Trump, QAnon, and 1/6

By Catherine Wessinger

…Euro-American Nativist Millennial Movement, were waiting and preparing to carry out a “Second American Revolution.” When Timothy McVeigh carried out the Oklahoma City Bombing on April 19, 1995, he was hoping to spark the Second American Revolution. Instead, people were shocked at the loss of 168 innocent lives in the bombing. As a result, the militias that had formed, especially after the aggressive handling of the Branch Davidian community by AT…