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More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e group did not get a private meeting with Pope Francis, but was given VIP tickets to the pope’s weekly audience in St. Peter’s square. Religion News Service reports that several bishops, including “San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone – point man or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ battle against gay marriage – had written a letter to the Vatican on their behalf.” A group of LGBT Catholics from London who met up with the New Ways…

Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…applaud this news, a murmur through the convention hall, Blackberries and iPhones tweeting on all sides of me. “When you come out of the closet, shut the door behind you because you won’t need it anymore,” he continues. (Who’s he talking to? He’s preaching to the choir, isn’t he? As far as he knows?) “If you don’t have a deity,” he says, “you are an atheist.” I’m an English teacher and I agree this may indeed define an atheist—someone without a g…

Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

By Kathryn Joyce

…abortion clinics, particularly Dr. Tiller’s, and were arrested in massive numbers. One local activist told me that nearly 25 anti-abortion groups had been birthed during the Summer of Mercy, some of which are still active. The protests so shaped the city that, 22 years later, both sides recall the fight vividly. Faced with what was initially meant to be a week of protests, Wichita officials requested that the clinic close, and Dr. Tiller complied…

Global LGBT Recap: Nigeria Jails Gays, Russian Orthodox Spox Calls for Criminalization Referendum

By Peter Montgomery

…sion talking about the LGBT people being less than human. For example, the number two person in the state broadcasting company – actually now he’s the number one person – hosted a show devoted to the question of whether it was enough to protect our children to ban homosexual propaganda or whether more needed to be done. He argued that more needed to be done. He said and we need to outlaw blood and sperm donations by them. And if they die in car ac…

Death in the Desert: Riding With the Samaritans

By Lauri Lebo

…grants from their homes. They are pulled to the U.S. because of demand for cheap labor. One of the major pushes came in the ’90s with the passage of NAFTA, which opened the door to many agri-businesses to move farms down to Mexico, putting small farmers out of business. And while the number of undocumented border crossers is down, Brother David says, it will be virtually impossible to eliminate them as long as the opportunities for jobs exist. As…

Turkish Police Move Against Activists Who Defied Pride Ban; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…t reminds us that Paprocki performed an exorcism after same-sex couples in Illinois were given the right to legally marry. Rev. James Martin, author of a recent book on LGBT people and the Catholic Church and subject of a recent Vice profile, publicly challenged Paprocki’s edict, tweeting, “If bishops ban members of same-sex couples from funeral rites, they must also ban divorced and remarried Catholics without annulments.” Paprocki responded, “Th…

Memo to David Brooks: Francis Is Not Naïve For Criticizing Capitalism

By Peter Laarman

…credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign energy sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or perhap…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…ith formal, centralized leadership. With access to drug money, oil wealth, cheap weapons, and consumer-grade digital toys, they don’t have to worry that 93% of people in the Muslim world still refuse to condone the 9/11 attacks. No one can control them: not their communities, their politicians, their leading clerics, nor even their ostensible figurehead, bin Laden himself. When forced out of one area, the fighters re-create another in their own im…

“Reconciliation” With Indigenous People is Comforting For Many Canadians, But is a Christian Concept Up To The Task?

By Pamela Klassen and Joseph Wiebe

…then it has to begin by tackling the question of land. Swampy, virgin, and cheap Canadians who tell stories about land in a public setting can no longer do so while ignoring that they (we) are treaty people—that Canadians live in nation-to-nation relations with Indigenous peoples. As treaty people, part of the responsibility of settlers is to know and tell stories that acknowledge Indigenous land is the very same territory that they also call home…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…sle. Nevertheless, his ambition outstretches any run-of-the-mill author of cheap thrillers. For better or worse, after two runaway bestsellers that claim to upend the traditional story of Christianity, he has become America’s most important pop philosopher and historian. In the earlier books, he hatched a version of the faith that spoke to many people in ways that churches no longer seem able to. Now, by turning to Freemasonry in The Lost Symbol,…