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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

…f 17,200 plus Catholic women that was fed into the Synod conversation. The International Survey of Catholic Women: Analysis and Report of Key Findings is an important read. Results highlight that even women who are very critical of the church value their Catholic identity; there’s general consensus around the need for reform; the centrality of abuse in its many forms is a major concern; and that there is a stark rejection of clericalism in every f…

Trump the Totem: Like Other Fascist Leaders, Trump has Turned from Man to Symbol — And That’s the Danger

By Robert P. Jones

…back against that corruption, the deep state and all the rest.” Given any number of other statements by Johnson, this comment may seem unremarkable. But the transformation of Trump from a person to a symbol is the key to understanding the power of the MAGA movement and the internal logic of the upside-down world where a unanimous guilty verdict in a fair trial results in solidified support, record fundraising, and desperate Christian defenses of…

Prisoners In the Hands of an Angry God: A Conversation About Religion and Reform

By Andrew Aghapour and Stephanie Gaskill

…r people in prison. As I’ve talked with people, it has become clear that a number of other factors play a role: their position within the criminal justice system, their personal experiences with law enforcement, their relationships with incarcerated people. I’ve met people who were staunch supporters of a “tough on crime” approach until one of their loved ones got locked up. I’ve met people who were somewhat indifferent to criminal justice system…

Gen Z’s Religious Affiliation Stats Are Confusing … But Only When Viewed From a Christian-Centric Perspective

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…ay they “believe in God without a doubt,” broken down by generation: Gen Z numbers drop off precipitously since the late nineties. The second showed the number who say they “believe in some higher power.” Here, Gen Z showed an equally precipitous rise, since around 2012. Thompson’s tweet betrays some exasperation with the apparently contradictory results: “Depending on how you ask the question,” he wrote, Gen Z was either “leading a stunning athei…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…, a number of Western women felt moved to show their support for Amina. An international movement called Femen staged bare-breasted protests in European cities, in which the writings on their chests echoed Amina’s, along with “Freedom for women” and “Fuck your morals.” (Be warned: photos contain nudity and strong language.) But Femen did not have the last word. Almost immediately, there was a backlash from some Muslim women who did not appreciate…

Census Reveals Gay People are Shockingly… Normal

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

According to new census figures, the number of people reporting that they are living with a same-sex partner has risen 52 percent in the last decade. That’s almost 902,000 people who are living all across the United States. Even here in my own incredibly conservative state of South Carolina, the number of same-sex couples increased and a quarter of them are raising children. It’s those kinds of facts that have right-wing media like the Christian…

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

By Layton E. Williams

…, self-harm, and suicide among LGBT youth and adults. Of course, a growing number of churches and denominations today have rejected such a destructive understanding of human sexuality. Religion Dispatches recently compiled a list of the official positions on LGBT issues currently taught by various Christian denominations. According to this list, mainline Protestant denominations such as the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church claim th…

How a Ruling for Masterpiece Cakeshop Could Embolden White Nationalists

By Sunnivie Brydum

…or even federal—protections aimed at combatting discrimination against any number of marginalized populations. “The cultural and political prominence of religious freedom as an American ideal draws people to it,” Wenger said. “The reason people appeal to it for all sorts of purposes is because it’s so culturally, politically, and legally powerful.” Indeed, as Wenger’s book documents in deep historical detail, the bedrock American principle has alr…

The Suppression of Sin in Evangelical Abolitionism: The Wilberforce Problem

By Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

…part, due to attention to the issue from the evangelical media machine. A number of books have been published by Christian presses in recent years with titles like God in the Brothel: An Undercover Journey into Sex Trafficking and Rescue, The Slave Across the Street: A True Story of How an American Teen Survived the World of Human Trafficking, and Half the Church: Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women. The latter, written by Carolyn Custis Ja…

Feeding on the Faithful: How Supernatural Thinking Empowered the Third Reich

By Eric Kurlander

…the sheer scale of the Second World War; and because of the unprecedented number of documents preserved in hundreds of archives and libraries across dozens of countries, this is obviously not the case. The second is that there’s little to no reality behind popular cultural representations of the Nazi supernatural. While many of these representations are exaggerated or erroneous, many others have some basis in reality. In the case of Hitler’s Mons…