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Hold Your Applause: Potential Changes to Roles of Catholic Women and LGBTQ+ People May Just Be Vatican Breadcrumbing

By Mary E. Hunt

…r hope and interest. You are being breadcrumbed. Breadcrumbing is what the Vatican does to people whom it marginalizes. For example, at first a single nun, Natalie Becquart, was made a part of the Synod staff with voting privileges. That gave hope to many. Now, once they’re approved by Francis, at least 35 women (non-binary people are far from Vatican radar) will vote along with several hundred bishops. Again, more enthusiasm. These crumbs, like t…

Contrary to Claims of Anti-Trans Muslims, LGBTQ+ Acceptance is Widespread in the History of Islam

By Ali Olomi

…he Islamic world has more to do with 19th and 20th century European sexual values than it does the Islamic sexual ethos. Despite this, there’s a concerted effort by some conservative Muslims to portray Islamic thought on matters of sexuality as monolithic, insisting on a singular interpretation of sex and sexuality that makes no room for gay, trans, or gender nonconforming Muslims. If it were true that the Islamic world consistently and unambiguou…

New Poll: Evangelicals Backing Trump

By Daniel Schultz

…ted, just like all Christians. Those unaffiliated voters—the “Nones”—now rival white evangelicals in size. About two-thirds of them support Hillary Clinton, making them a solid Democratic constituency, though Clinton surely would like to run up even higher totals. In some ways, you could see 2016 as the Evangelicals-vs.-Nones election. The two groups will approach rough parity as Sanders voters get behind Clinton, however grudgingly. Because the N…

Along Came a Spider: What the Pope Doesn’t See

By Anthea Butler

…y, as many of the dioceses in the United States become uninsurable and the number of Catholic churches dwindles. As membership shrinks, the number of ordinations decreases, and the coffers dry up, perhaps the Vatican and its leadership will be forced to look at its decrepit, hierarchical structure, and fix it. I doubt it, however. Like the spider who crawled across Pope Benedict’s robes this weekend in Prague, everyone except the Pope can see the…

The Religious Case Against Religious Discrimination in Cakeshop Case

By Patrick Hornbeck

…like Phillips’s. But, as survey after survey has demonstrated, substantial numbers of Catholics, and to a lesser extent evangelicals as well, are not following their denominations’ leaders down this particular road, and there is a growing number of religious institutions that have embraced marriage equality and advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in the public square. Cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop make it clear that the boundaries of a national settleme…

Debunking the Myth That Democracy Is “Incompatible” With Islam

By Asma Afsaruddin

…eality very complex indeed and hardly a homogenous global phenomenon. The evacuation of religion from the public sphere as a sine qua non for a functioning democracy is a modern myth propagated by certain cultural warriors in the West, often in a polemical vein to set up a contrast to what appears to them the religion-infused societies of the Islamic world. This premise is then seized upon by religious reactionaries in a number of Muslim-majority…

Black Churches are Burning: Is It the 1990s All Over Again?

By Katie Day

…acial hate crimes in 60 percent of the cases in five Southern states and Nevada. In subsequent years, the numbers fell: there were 209 church arsons in 1997 and 166 the following year, according to their annual reports. The last report was issued in 2001. Altogether there were almost 900 reported cases of church arson in the late 1990s—a huge number compared to what we’ve seen in the last two weeks. A second difference is that of public response….

A Secret History of Satan

By W. Scott Poole

…n, in some cases public policy. The book makes the case that a significant number of Americans believe in the same Devil believed in by Puritan preachers and 19th-century evangelists. This cannot be dismissed. Its essential to understand why this is so, what historical conditions gave rise to this phenomenon and what does it tell us about the United States. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I had several groups in mind, all of…

The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon

By Nathan Schneider

…look at a text which perhaps they’ve been afraid of or thought has no relevance to them. I’m not trying to convert them. If I had a fantasy, it would be Abraham Joshua Heschel saying to me, “That was very good. I liked that.” Of course, he did read the Gospels. But there is a cohort of very high-minded Jews who feel the Gospels are dangerous, and I understand that completely. I hope I can be trustworthy enough to the Jewish community that I can l…

The Quixotic Task of Debunking David Barton

By Paul Harvey

…rton performs with these words is beyond me). They constitute instead a private language that validates Barton’s own self-conception as a defender of Truth against those who, according to him, do not believe in any Truths of any sort. It’s a case study, in some ways, of recent depictions of the neuroscience of political differences, and in particular the way “righteous minds” conceive of the world. And it’s a perfect example of the thesis that Ra…