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Equally Blessed: Wear a Rainbow Ribbon to Mass

By Alex McNeill

…and then change policies from there. What are the biggest obstacles in the way of policy change in the Catholic church? With LGBT issues, the greatest obstacle is silence, though the obstacles run the gamut from silence to violence. By breaking the silence, even in small ways, we are planting the seeds of change. What’s next? The ultimate goal is to have a Catholic church that accepts and respects all of its members. LGBT people and youth are defi…

UPDATED: The Coup That Never Ends: ‘Whitemanism’ and the Perils of a Flimsy Liberalism

By Peter Laarman

…rican exceptionalism, and that this same resurgent whitemanism—which has always had strong elements of Freud’s death drive (Todestrieb) baked into it—will keep us from averting the worst possible environmental apocalypse. Another way to put this: The times, they aren’t a-changin’. And time itself is very short. UPDATE: Is a Fixation on Race Betraying the Class Struggle? Take this as an addendum to my above post. And yes, this belongs on RD. Fo…

Rape and Richard Mourdock’s Semi-Omnipotent God

By Sarah Sentilles

…n—snow, a home run, illness, rape—becomes its own kind of justification, a way to prove it’s what God wanted, which means all kinds of oppression can be cast as God’s will. So where does it end? What can’t be justified by appealing to God’s intention in this way? This essay? God intended it (as if that will stop all the hate mail I’m likely to get when this posts). Flood? God intended it. Pregnancy? God intended it. Environmental destruction? God…

Global LGBT Recap: World Vision Caves, World Congress of Families Vamps, God Weeps

By Peter Montgomery

…commenter noted in response, the church’s Director of Legislative Affairs Dwayne Leslie wrote critically about Uganda’s anti-gay law last week in the Huffington Post. He called the law “astonishingly severe” and “abhorrent,” and affirmed recent comments by Adventist President Ted Wilson in favor of strong separation between church and state. Love, wrote Leslie, is always the answer in how to deal with disagreement. But you could forgive LGBT-affir…

Margaret Cho: God Bless You, Fing Fers

By Lisa Webster

……manure. But I mean that in a sort of amused way, not in a tut-tut kind of way. It’s just a funny image. Here at RD we are trying to project some kind of earnestness. In the public square we are the ones wearing black jeans or tweed or natty preacher suits. And we are talking to one another in a quiet but impassioned way—while checking our Blackberries. (And maybe drinking beer out of a brown bag.) Over at margaretcho.com the knives are coming out…

Will Millennials Forge a Future for the Progressive Black Church?

By Joshua L. Lazard

…wing from the exodus narrative of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. Midway her sermon, she found a way to weave political criticism, social awareness and theology together wonderfully. This also included a fiery critique of not just the Trump administration, but also disdain for those who meet with Trump on behalf of minority communities. When asked how she arrived at her theological claims, Parker said “I first noticed the promises were not a…

Repent, Hillary: Trump’s Evangelical Backers Play the Sin Card

By Hollis Phelps

…icalism, especially in politics. George W. Bush, for instance, didn’t shy away from discussing his past misdeeds—which Molly Ivins has characterized as “a life of sin, drinking, womanizing (before marriage) and, by inference, drugs.” He embraced his past as transformed and converted, as a way to emphasize religious bona fides with the GOP’s evangelical base. It’s no wonder, then, that Bush could be described as “a man of faith.” More recently, for…

Why We Stay: What the History of Mormonism Reveals About the Origins of “Race”

By Max Mueller

…sure, Mormons have historically been predominately white; that is, in the way Americans understand “whiteness.” But Mormon whiteness has always been contested (see W. Paul Reeve’s amazing book on the Mormons’ struggle for whiteness). What’s more, today most Mormons are non-American and likely non-white (the biggest Mormon growth areas are in the African diasporas of Central and South America and Africa). The Mormon people and the LDS Church itsel…

The Children of Bellow and Roth: New Book of Short Fiction Takes On the Male Jewish Experience

By Stephanie Russell-Kraft

…ultural group it’s often assumed that you see your identity in a political way. I wasn’t overtly saying this, but the character gets forced into some sort of political role anyway. I was more interested in seeing him trapped in a situation through his own mistake. He’s just trying to get laid, and the whole thing snowballs on him. A lot of people are offended by that title. It’s like when you mention Israel⎯people get nervous just when you mention…

What Robot Theology Can Tell Us About Ourselves

By Michael Schulson

…t people don’t connect faith to the seemingly commercial details of, say, iPhones, or robots that care for the elderly, or the dynamics of personal relationships conducted over Skype, even though these changes have a bearing on the way we relate to other human beings. As an alternative to this silence, Staley’s work touches on two possible modes of religious response to technology, which I’ll call—because sci-fi topics deserve sci-fi names—the Str…