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

By Katie Day

…re 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. In 1995-96, there was a unique alliance of actors creating “perfect storm” conditions. Black churches had long been the targets of racial hatred. But it was when Green Bay Packers player, Reggie White, spoke in an interview during the Super Bowl of 1996 about the arson…

Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…f on social media. According to Gulf News, “Lawmakers, wary of the growing number of gays in the country, have been pushing for a crackdown, including the adoption of tougher immigration measures against expatriate homosexuals and their prompt deportation.” Egypt: ‘The Plight of Homosexuals in Egypt’ We reported last week on the prison sentences given to eight men arrested after a video of an unofficial same-sex wedding went viral. This week journ…

To Get Through This Time We’ll Have to Shred the ‘Racial Contract’ and Choose Solidarity Over Sacrifice

By Christophe D Ringer

…false one. With well over 100,000 deaths as of publication, more than the number of service members killed in World War I, America is living through an apocalyptic moment. But it’s also an apocalypse in the literal sense of an unveiling or disclosure—an unmasking. The coronavirus has unmasked how our lives are marked by a profound mutual dependence that challenges our self-understanding and political ideologies. It has unmasked a federal governme…

Size Matters According to New Study

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ns of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us. There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim i…

Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

By Andrew Aghapour

…basal ganglia, and other brain regions have been proposed to accomplish a number of specific functions. Imagine, for example, working intently on some task until you notice that your stomach is rumbling and that the daylight has shifted. You think back to when you last ate, gauge how long you’ve been working, and give yourself five minutes to finish up before having a light snack, so as not to ruin your dinner. An MRI scan of this thought proces…

Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

By Grant Gallicho

…be live-streamed, starting Wednesday, June 15). The bishops will take up a number of issues, from the revised liturgy to assisted suicide, but their conversations are sure to be dominated by an issue that has been dogging them since the mid-1980s: sexually abusive priests and the bishops who enabled them. Ten years after Cardinal Bernard Law became the poster bishop for failed religious leadership, new revelations of episcopal misfeasance threaten…

New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…gay or lesbian relationships are morally acceptable. Among Catholics, that number jumps to 66%. Protestants still lag behind, but 41% say gay and lesbian relationships are moral. Resorting to pseudo-science is the last gasp of anti-gay groups and they will certainly tout this study, ﬂaws and all, as proof that same-sex couples make awful parents and raise terribly troubled kids. Again, it’s no shock – the religious right wing is always quick to tw…

U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…anasia), vocations and ongoing formation (shoring up the rapidly declining number of priests and nuns) and, of course, religious freedom (Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who arranged Kim Davis’ meeting with Pope Francis, received two standing ovations from the bishops.). Then the debate turned to the USCCB’s quadrennial “Faithful Citizenship” voting guide. The bishops had voted earlier to revise the 2007 edition prepared for the 2008 election, whic…

Can the Catholic Church Survive Trump?

By Patricia Miller

…administration and the mandate. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2014. And starting around 2012, white Catholics broke for the GOP by historic margins. It’s also worth noting, as Michael Sean Winters has, that this occurred around the time the administrative staff of the bishops’ confer…

Indonesian Court Rejects Religious Conservatives’ Bid To Criminalize Gay Sex; More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…gender in official registration and on her national Identity Card. Italy: European Court of Human Rights slams failure to recognize same-sex couples’ marriages On December 14 the European Court of Human Rights condemned Italy for refusing to recognize the unions of same-sex couples married in other countries: The ECHR accepted that Italy’s choice not to allow same-sex marriages could not be condemned under human rights law, but the crux of the ca…