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Exclusive: Religious Leaders for Immigration Equality for Gay and Lesbian Couples

By Sarah Posner

…ted partners of U.S. citizens who are gay or lesbian, is compiling a large number of religious leaders, organizations, and denominations, to sign on to a letter supporting the legislation. As I reported last year, UAFA would correct a glaring inequality in our current immigration law: there are 36,000 bi-national couples in the United States—same-sex couples in which one is a US citizen and the other faces possible deportation if a partner or spo…

‘My Name is Legion’: Sources and Forces of White Supremacy in the U.S.

By R. Drew Smith

…actions) but, rather, between white colonial forces and their subjugated African and Native American contemporaries who were considered “inferiors.” And as historian Perry Miller notes, “encroachments, especially of inferior upon superior” were “never seriously called in question” in New England before 1730. Even in 1730, if anything was called into question it was class distinction—because no serious challenges of race orthodoxies would gain stre…

The Religious Right and the Tea Party on “Education Choice”

By Julie Ingersoll

…e open to anyone who wishes to attend, though there will be a limit on the number of schools (no more than ten in the next decade) and the number of students enrolled. Opponents see charter schools as quasi-privatized schools (and also fear that this is a first step toward further privatization). They see even these limited charter schools as a threat to funding for public education—especially in these difficult budget years where public education…

Teach Your Children Well: Challenging Religion-Based Sexism

By Sikivu Hutchinson

…at they could not give their ultimate all for the number one man on most African-American womens’ lips, and it’s not Denzel.” Women as Sluts, Men as Savages As the Religious Right continues to gut women’s rights, its cultural propaganda suggests that the only way a woman can truly be validated as a moral being is through the policing of her body and her sexuality. Tragically, some of the most vociferous defenders of this regime are other women. At…

The Black Church: Institution or Abstraction?

By Anthony B. Pinn

…ied in orientation as the number of congregations. There are millions of African American Christians housed in thousands of churches across the country; some of them rather large and others small in number. In using this phrase, we must remain mindful of the similarities and differences between local congregations, spread across urban and rural areas that the term, “Black Church,” easily covers. It is true that the term speaks to a generic embrace…

Five Social Media Trends that are Reshaping Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…into face-to-face relationships. If the folks at Nielsen are correct, smartphones will continue to overtake, uh, dumb phones, making app-based connection and information-sharing a continuing growth area. Religiously-themed apps are certain to be an important part of that, but unless they grasp the digital trinity of social engagement, spiritual meaning, and incarnational potential that makes such apps truly worthwhile for believers and seekers. Th…

Religious Kids Are More Selfish: The Stickers Don’t Lie

By Michael Schulson

…searchers control for one confounding variable here: socioeconomic status. Number of siblings? The researchers didn’t address that, even though religious engagement can be correlated with family size (thanks to a Reddit commenter for pointing this out). Amount of exposure to other kids outside of school? Ditto. Parents’ education levels? Missing. Heterogeneity of the surrounding community? Also left out. And so on. More slippery, though, is that t…

Growing Catholic Resistance to Bishops’ Crusades

By Peter Montgomery

…know that not everybody out there agrees with the bishops.” Pointing to a number of studies that show that about 90 percent of Catholics don’t follow the church’s official teaching on birth control, McCaulley said the group thought that since the bishop is “always willing to meet with priests,” they could raise the issue with Zubik and ask him to meet with laypeople, as “we didn’t feel competent to speak on women’s issues.” In Washington State, m…

2017 Around the World: Progress and Persecution For LGBT People

By Peter Montgomery

…ender and intersex people.” Russia: Anti-Gay Chechen officials hit with US sanctions The U.S. imposed financial sanctions on Ramzan Kadyrov, the anti-LGBT leader of Chechnya and a political ally of Vladimir Putin. According to AFP, “The US also imposed sanctions on the Chechen security official Ayub Kataev, likewise accused of gross violations of human rights and abuses against gay men, as well as three others accused of involvement in the corrupt…

Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) and the Rise of Extreme Evangelicalism

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…s copies of the book have sold for the past half century and it was ranked number 9 in the “Top 50 Books the Have Shaped Evangelicals” by Christianity Today, alongside works by C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Francis Schaffer, and Rick Warren. Her influence is well noted in her obituary by Kate Shellnutt at Christianity Today. Through Elliot’s book, evangelicals latched on to the deaths of these five young men, and their story became a galvanizin…