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Pope Denounces Gender Colonization; Indonesian Court Considers Islamist Request To Criminalize Homosexuality; Egypt’s Grand Mufti Says No One Has Right to Harm Homosexuals; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…can released the transcript of a meeting between the pope and bishops in Poland last week, in which Francis used harsh language to decry what anti-LGBT conservatives call “gender ideology.” From the transcript: I would like to conclude with this aspect, since behind all this there are ideologies. In Europe, America, Latin America, Africa, and in some countries of Asia, there are genuine forms of ideological colonization taking place. And one of th…

Is Army’s New “Humanist” Designation Just Semantic Hooey?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…es. The power the god of the Hebrew Bible confers on Adam to name all the plants and animals in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:19-20) helps humans to understand their surroundings and their place in the newly created world. So, too, the renaming of Abram as Abraham (Gen. 17:1-14) expresses his new, covenantal relationship to God and marks the future trajectory of his lineage. Indeed, in many religions, choosing a name that expresses a close coherence…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…omen” 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 the “support.” A Facebook group, Muslim Women Against FEMEN, has encouraged Muslim women to post photos of themselves—in whatever they choose to wear—with sentiments such as “Do I look oppressed to you?” or “Nudity DOES NOT liberate me and…

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…mingly Catholic country with a dominant Spanish influence. With a dizzying number of languages, economic classes, ethnicities and cultures represented in American Catholic churches, American Catholics resist singularity. And it follows that they are going to be inconsistent in how they define mercy, as the hierarchy of the American church is often wont to demonstrate. Even the variety of American “Mercy Doors” found online defies comparison to the…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…Your Parachute? fame—a former Episcopal priest) and the equally remarkable number of notable preachers who had strong commercial instincts and/or commercial roots (ranging from 18th-century superstar evangelist George Whitefield to 19th-century revivalist giant Charles G. Finney and many others). Lehmann corrects our usual impression that mainly lower-class types got swept into revivalism, pointing out that leading women and men also “got religion…

‘Cult’ Is an Inaccurate, Unhelpful and Dangerous Label for Followers of Trump, QAnon, and 1/6

By Catherine Wessinger

…. Such movements include the Pai Marire movement among the Maori in New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s, and the “Ghost Dance” movement among Native Americans in the Western United States in the late nineteenth century. In the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, white people, especially farming families and people living in rural small towns, felt that their way of life and ownership of land and property were threatened by their inability to keep…

Evangelical Pastor Argues for Full LGBT Inclusion: “I Think It’s Inevitable”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…you to write this book? I had been doing a rethink on this question for a number of years and my convictions had changed but I didn’t know how to process it in the congregation at that stage. I had processed it with the church board and pastoral staff and different leaders. I was doing a lectio divina when I got the idea to write a letter to my congregation. I didn’t want to have congregational meetings to talk about how to handle this because th…

Islamic Intellectual Leadership at a Crossroads

By Amina Wadud

…th, for both are part of my devotion to Allah). They do have a substantial number of women included, so I would not complain on that count. But, here’s the thing: there are no women under the category of Muslim intellectuals. Apparently women don’t think. So it is even harder to adjust to the loss of these three men whose intellectual contributions helped to shape the ways we think about and in fact live Islam today; both for women and for men. I…

Lessons from the Defeat of the Oklahoma Personhood Bill

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…for Reproductive Justice who did their own lobbying, and ultimately a good number of legislators themselves. It seems that’s when the personhood battle really became a power struggle between the personhood lobby and the Republican leadership. With so many amendments and so much public controversy surrounding the bill, the Republican leadership opted not to bring the bill forward. This raised the ire of Personhood USA and Oklahomans for Life, who c…

Two Women and a Mosque: A Convert Community Grows in Panama City

By Aliyya Swaby

…ple attend Friday prayer services every week, most of them Indian. But the number of Panamanian converts is rapidly growing. Bhattay said about two or three new converts come to Jama Mosque every week. Six months ago, the mosque began offering classes in Spanish — instead of just in Urdu — to accommodate the growing demand. There is no discrimination in the Muslim community in Panama City, Bhattay said. “Maybe ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, there…