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The Quiet Passing of Fundamentalist Mormon Prophet Lynn A. Thompson Suggests Polygamy Recognition Remains a Distant Hope

By Cristina Rosetti

…o continued the controversial marital practice. According to the Apostolic United Brethren, they were charged with continuing the “fundamentals” of the faith—namely polygamy—after the LDS Church essentially brought an end to the practice in 1904. Over the past two years, the legal and criminal status of polygamy in the US has once again been at the center of public attention. At the start of the 2020 Utah legislative session, Senator Deidre Hender…

Global LGBT Recap: Mandela and Equality; Elton John Defies Russian Ban; Fake-Healing of AIDS

By Peter Montgomery

…od in the way of same-sex families being able to travel as a family to the United States.” Thinking Strategically At least two gatherings in the past week focused on the strategic promotion of LGBT equality abroad. On Friday, December 6, in Washington, D.C., the Center for Transatlantic Relations, which is part of the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, hosted a presentation called “LGBT Rights: A Geost…

Why I Will Not See The Help: A Rant

By Rosetta E. Ross

…t Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, I once heard now-deceased United Methodist Bishop Nolan Harmon justify enslavement to his Methodist Polity class by saying that “somebody had to do the work.” (The economic structure of the South depended on farming and 19th-century farming required vast human labor.) Nolan Harmon was a signatory of the infamous letter from eight Southern white clergy saying Birmingham demonstrations were “unwise an…

Found in Translation: How a Thirteenth-Century Islamic Poet Conquered America

By Ryann Croken

…arks may have had to escort Rumi through Ellis Island to import him to the United States, he has shown that one can Americanize an “other” without bastardizing him. The task of a translator working across vast expanses of time and space is not easy, and what Barks has done is beautifully—indeed, wondrously—rendered Rumi into an English that pierces through the souls of millions of Westerners, yet still remains reverently (if only relatively) faith…

Rick Warren’s Biblical Blowback

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…d by troubling implication, the judgment is now to be directed against the United States, not against the Iranians. The bizarre implication of the way Warren reads his scriptures places the United States in the surreal position of being like the Amorites, the Amalekites, or worset—which is precisely what the so-called Enemies of Freedom are claiming that we have become. Behind all of these scriptural and theological confusions lies a still deeper…

The January 6 Select Committee Cannot Ignore This Christian Movement

By Andrew L. Seidel

…es opposite Hodges, they carried that Christian flag onto the floor of the United States Senate. They attacked, they conquered, they paraded their flag on the vanquished ground . . . and then they said a prayer to Jesus in that senate. Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government. We love you and we thank you. In Chri…

What the Ferguson Protests Mean for Religious Progressive Activism

By Shannon Craigo-Snell

…as one among many who participated in protests in 170 locations around the United States. As the police gathered in numbers, as they ran towards us in the street, I felt an odd sense of hope. The ridiculously extreme response of authorities in Ferguson is an inverse measure of the potential of this movement. For people invested in white rule and racial disparity, the current protests are, indeed, a threat to the American way of life. But for many…

India’s Elections and the “Doniger Affair”

By Murali Balaji

…too good to pass up. Many of these activists and scholars also live in the United States and the United Kingdom, often conjuring up fantasies of a right-wing Hindu takeover of Western institutions. Some, in the wake of the elections, have even tried to re-write history to a much more favorable interpretation of the Nehruvian model of secularism. However, they’ve remained conspicuously silent on India’s censorship of Salman Rushdie or Taslima Nasri…

Vatican Fires Shot at US Religious Right, Calls Out “Religious Liberty” Industry and “Evangelical-Catholic Alliance”

By Patricia Miller

…s liberty” of Catholics is under attack in western democracies such as the United States, even as Spadaro and Figueroa criticize its use for political ends: The erosion of religious liberty is clearly a grave threat within a spreading secularism. But we must avoid its defense coming in the fundamentalist terms of a “religion in total freedom,” perceived as a direct virtual challenge to the secularity of the state. While much of their criticism is…

Racism and Anti-Semitism Are Not Intrusions of a Dark Past Into Our Present

By Joyce Dalsheim and Gregory Starrett

…ch the future is always an improvement. It’s true that in the contemporary United States Jews are neither stifled by the kinds of discrimination they faced in the early twentieth century, nor are they the victims of regular police violence or the more insidious forms of structural violence to which black, native, and other marginalized Americans are subject daily. But to suggest that the shooting in Pittsburgh is an aberration is inadequate. It’s…