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2017 Around the World: Progress and Persecution For LGBT People

By Peter Montgomery

…who says her role as an activist is twofold: “one aspect of her work is to communicate with the religious community to lobby for greater acceptance of LGBT Israelis in religious life, and the other is to raise awareness among members of the public.” Her most visible campaign, titled ‘Our Faces’, targets young, in-the-closet Israelis who perceive a contradiction between religious observance and homosexuality. The campaign, launched two years ago, p…

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

By Layton E. Williams

…n atheist, but the post-Orlando call for Christians to recognize their own complicity in homophobic violence has come from within the church as well. Even Pope Francis acknowledged that the church owes an apology to gay people, though he did so without suggesting any change in the Catholic Church’s stance that homosexuality is a sin. Rev. Denise Anderson, who was recently elected as one of the co-moderators of my own denomination—the Presbyterian…

“Split at the Root”: Adrienne Rich and (Religious) Identity

By Ryan Harper

…(“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. / The beak that grips her, she becomes.”), or the committed poet’s identity (“She cannot teach the end of bonds; but she can refuse to justify, accord with, ignore their existence”). This daughter of a fairly well-to-do Baltimore family—raised in part by an African-American domestic worker—also understood the struggle for identity did not occur only among the marginalized, though the struggle became starkl…

Does God Want Jeremy Lin to Win?

By Jay Michaelson

…f he gets into a fight in a bar, or behaves inappropriately with women, or commits any number of minor sins which ordinary people get away with every day—he lets down not only himself and his family, but his faith community and the Asian-American (and to some extent Asian) community as a whole, which currently views him as a hero. Can you imagine the pressure? And yet, so far at least, neither Tebow nor Lin has fallen. No crashed cars at three a.m…

Catholic Leaders Offer Criticism, Support to Boxer Pacquiao After Anti-Gay Comments…

By Peter Montgomery

…s Justice Party, tweeted that the Prophet Mohammed said “Whomever you find committing the acts of the community of Lot (homosexual) should be put to death.” Sembering later deleted the tweet in response to online criticism. A few people, including religious studies scholar Akhmad Sahal, suggested Sembering was importing the rhetoric of ISIS, which has publicized the execution of many alleged gay men that it justifies with this same passage of scri…

The Revolution Will Not Be Fetishized: Taking Resistance Beyond the Spiritual Industrial Complex

By Andrea R. Jain

…erve certain neoliberal, conservative, or nationalist agendas, there are a number of commitments that many of them claim to embrace. These include commitments to the following: religious and cultural pluralism, gender equity, racial and sexual diversity, environmental sustainability, scientific inquiry and historical-critical commentary, and a public space that guarantees both freedom of and from religion. Hence, I am certain the number of self-pr…

Mormon Tabernacle Choir Will Usher In the Trump Era

By Benjamin E. Park

…hite evangelicals; the Utah College Exit Poll, however, with a much higher number of Mormon participants, put the number closer to 45 percent. Both figures are well below previous Mormon voting percentages for the Republican candidates, but they indicate that at least half of Latter-day Saints were willing to stomach Trump’s apparent moral deficiencies. This turn of events has historical precedent. Though the LDS Church’s political affiliation was…

Conservative Christianity and Its Discontents

By Karl Giberson and Randall J. Stephens

…n Baptist churches when they discovered he accepted evolution. Others have come to the microphone after a talk and implied that, in accepting evolution, he was “under the influence of the devil.” Collins regularly gets critical commentary from non-believers like Jerry Coyne and Sam Harris, but, as he has said, the “nastiest” messages come from fellow Christians, “infuriated that someone who claims to be a believer could say these things about the…

‘Welcome to the War’: What a Creationist Conference Can Teach us About Evangelical Vaccine Resistance

By Caroline Matas

…st likely to indicate outright refusal to take a Covid-19 vaccine, while a number of other studies have also found that number hovering close to 25 percent. Journalists and academics alike have attempted to make sense of this discrepancy, pointing to existential fear, anti-intellectualism, and Christian nationalism as potential influences on American evangelicals’ vaccine antipathy. As a scholar of American evangelicalism and media, I am inclined…

The Role of Faith in the Lives of Abortion Providers

By Sarah Posner

…prayed at that God is not supporting this. This is nonsense.” The growing number of crisis pregnancy centers are “applying the principle that women should not enjoy sex, that women are on a pedestal like the blessed mother.” For the doctor, her faith is “an important part of my life I think it still helps me find balance and determine what actions to take. I do feel like I have a calling for certain things, including the work I do, and that come…