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Our Father, Who Art Our Mother: The (Open) Secret Queer History of God

By Mark Sameth

…ptualizing God in this “new-old” way (to borrow a term from the Zohar) may help disabuse us of the idea that our world is fundamentally dichotomous and hierarchal. Indeed, the metaphor may help us to appreciate the world’s differences as sitting in creative tension within a larger, all-embracing reality (a concept to which the philosophers gave the name coincidentia oppositorum, and which today is more often referred to by the term “integral”). Of…

Beth Moore’s Departure Could Hurt Southern Baptists and Move Them Further Right

By Daniel Schultz

…stors leaving may or may not accelerate that trend, but it certainly won’t help. Likewise, their departure may not do lasting damage to the SBC in the sense that it might not provoke successive waves of disaffiliation. (In other words, their followers could choose to leave, but it would be a more or less one-off event, not an ongoing phenomenon.) At the same time, people who leave the church tend not to return, and they certainly don’t bring their…

Conventional Wisdom: RNC/DNC Giving God a Bad Name?

By Peter Laarman

…e pages yesterday. Consultant Burns Strider, who largely makes his living helping Democrats talk the talk, made the whole affair in Charlotte sound like one big prayer meeting. After noting that he’s “not into word counts,” Strider still found it necessary to remind readers that the platform was, in fact, amended by voice vote to include the word “God.” So there! Blogging on the Washington Post website, Strider wrote that the convention was “robu…

Arkansas’s Creationism Bill is Also Motivated by Anti-Trans Bigotry

By Andrew L. Seidel

…ed, “we see here that God has created each of us uniquely . . . we need to help you be the you that God created. . .” (Bentley inadvertently showcased one of the major problems with teaching biblical concepts as truth in public schools: whose “biblical truth” is true? Here she quoted the Passion Translation, which is less a translation and more an interpretation or, as the authors claim, a “heart-level translation that expresses God’s fiery heart….

Imagine No Religion: Sustaining Morality Without God

By Konstantin Petrenko

…e a sense of empathy and an altruistic urge to cooperate, reciprocate, and help the other. These are the building blocks of morality that allow some form of moral consensus to emerge. Such a consensus would not necessarily resemble a Judeo-Christian ethic or any other moral system familiar to us, but it would nevertheless represent some rudimentary form of a moral order. If evolutionary psychologists are correct, morality did not emerge in respons…

American Brokenness: A Lament

By Daniel Schultz

…, in the long run, avoiding the risk of connection to broken people is not helpful. This perilous moment in the life of our collective enterprise is not a time to meet division and hostility with more of the same. It is a time to surround one another with compassion; to recognize the real pain and discomfort of others; and to welcome them with open arms into the shared project of finding freedom, justice, and power together. That, as I always say,…

On Religion, Abortion, and Politics: Dr. George Tiller’s Christian Ethics

By Ed Knudson

…community where such is the ethos. If Dr. Tiller had asked his pastor for help in making medical decisions, his pastor (if functioning from Lutheran tradition) would finally have told him that he had to make his decision within the context of his own relationship before God. In other words, the significance of the subjective relationship extends to ethics as well as worship. The community of believers may help one another in moral deliberation, b…

For Some of Us, the Biggest Religious Event of 2016 Was the Gilmore Girls Revival

By Isabel Fattal

…ng that online interactions aren’t honest person-to-person experiences can help make the pain caused in these spheres hurt less, but as the presidential election jarringly reminded us, the Internet has remarkable power. Our little personal-but-public communities are insulating, and they’re dangerous. The Gilmore Girls revival pokes fun at the bubble of Stars Hollow, the small Connecticut town that is Lorelai and Rory’s whole world; in a running jo…

‘Putin’s Children’ Push ‘Traditional Values’ in Latvia; Jewish Reparative Therapy Group Finds ‘Haven’ In Israel; Sikh Activist in UK Supports LGBT South Asians; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…months and sometimes years, or even never. One should definitely not seek help of social services, she says, because this is the surest step to child removal from the family. The hidden goal of the child protection services is to legalize the illegal child trade. Kornetova’s presentation shows potential buyers of children: childless couples, especially those who are unable to conceive, same-sex couples and pedophiles. “And they want our children,…

Catholic Bishops’ Theological Mistakes on Abortion Come at a High Price

By Mary E. Hunt

…ical and psychological state of extreme vulnerability. Focus on that child helps to prioritize what to do and why. Recourse to abstract concepts like “right to life,” “abortion on demand,” and “fetus is a person” skew the theological conversation away from the pastoral reality at hand and toward a patriarchal parochial norm that violates the pregnant woman once again. To be clear, there is only one child abused in this case, not two as the bishops…