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Vatican Reverses Anti-Liberation Policies in Mexico

By Ruth Chojnacki and Jennifer Scheper Hughes

…ate, an ancient institution revived by Vatican II. In 2000, 341 of Mexico’s 800 deacons served the Diocese of San Cristobal, the largest number of deacons in any Catholic diocese in the world. Vatican suspicion of Bishop Ruiz’s liberationist pastoral strategy resulted in a failed attempt to remove him in 1993. The deacon program came under particular scrutiny after the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, with reports that Maya catechists defied th…

Heterosexual Martyrs and Gay Saints: Did AIDS Coverage Clear the Way for LGBT Equality?

By Diane Winston

…black churches as detached from the crisis. Despite the rising number of African Americans with AIDS, black congregations offered little comfort and even less outreach to the afflicted, according to press reports. Black churches were slow to respond, reporters noted, because most believed that homosexuality was a sin. Yet were black congregations any more homophobic than white churches with similar theology? If Jerry Falwell became the media’s rig…

Clergy May Soon Find Taxes Soaring As Result of an Under-the-Radar Ruling

By Patrick Hornbeck

…best endowed financially, provide parsonages. But over time, an increasing number of clergy have made their own living arrangements. Churches found parsonages prohibitively expensive; congregants preferred to see their donations go toward services rather than clergy housing; and new religious ventures, especially the nondenominational and evangelical churches that began to flourish in the second half of the twentieth century, could not boast the h…

Religious Exceptions Not So Exceptional According to New Study

By Patricia Miller

…most Catholic health care institutions have accepted the accommodation, a number of the nation’s 260 Catholic institutions of higher learning as well as Catholic nonprofits are seeking a broader exemption that would in effect bar their insurers from providing contraceptive coverage as specified under the accommodation designed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a consolidated case challenging th…

Kirk Cameron Joins the Anti-Mormon Chorus
(Sort Of)

By Julie Ingersoll

While a number of conservative Christian leaders raise questions about Glenn Beck’s Mormonism, Worldview Matters’ host Brannon Howse continued his attack in a conversation with Kirk Cameron about why Cameron did not participate in Glenn Beck’s Divine Destiny. Howse marveled at the “thick irony” wherein Cameron (the actor who played Buck, the converted journalist warning about the “demonic spirituality of a one world religion” in the Left Behind m…

Pastor of Kentucky Church Severed From Baptists Over LGBT Inclusion: Not Activism, Just Honesty

By Mike Greer

…years. I came about the time that folks from Burma began arriving in large numbers and uniting in membership with Crescent Hill, and much of my time in those early years was spent trying to figure out how in the world we might be able to be a unified body that includes people who don’t speak English, who have a completely foreign background and cultural experience. It took a lot of hard work but we reached a place a number of years ago where, whil…

New Film Chronicles Unlikely Friendship in Battle Over God and Guns

By Sarah Posner

…to speaking out about it. Schenck, whose organization bills itself as “America’s only Christian outreach to top-level government officials in Washington, DC ,” is a white evangelical with close ties to conservative Republicans. In the film, he describes his “affinity” with Tea Party Republicans; McBath talks about her father, who for decades served as the president of the Illinois NAACP. Despite his dedication to both religious and political cons…

Pope Tweeted into Retirement

By Rachel Wagner

…in the early nineties for most people consisted largely of acquiring plane tickets, reading relatively static documents, and emailing acquaintances. By 2004, the year before John Paul died, search engines had become sophisticated and powerful, and the immensely popular online world Second Life was in its third year. MySpace had appeared the year before, and Mark Zuckerberg was feverishly writing the code that would become Facebook. YouTube was ju…

“Equality is Not a Feeling”

By Joanna Brooks

…Participants returned to a local park to listen to Conference on their cellphones—the first time in history that Church officials permitted broad media access to the event, a move some have characterized as a concession to ticket requests from Ordain Women leaders. Inside the Tabernacle and the nearby Conference Center, rows of seats went unfilled. Saturday’s Ordain Women action has initiated an unprecedented conversation about power, leadership,…

For the Love of God, Bono, Please Stop Touring

By Ben Swihart

…that has advocated for the subsidized drugs that have saved millions of Africans. I guess he isn’t an American, so I can’t be too hard on him for not understanding that the same government he is praising also ignored the very same problem when it was predominantly the LGBTQ community taking the brunt of that epidemic. Oh yeah, and 45 hasn’t paid income taxes in like 18 years. Is that the reason he wasn’t on the guest list? It is easy to recognize…