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Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…ple and more themes and more issues into the curriculum. But we don’t. Our best books and our best courses articulate clean, sharp arguments, have lively and engaging narratives, and are relevant. PBS is shooting for exactly the same thing. I hope that academics will view this documentary as a step in the right direction. PBS has spent millions of dollars and solicited the advice of many of the best scholars in the nation in search of God in Ameri…

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…

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…

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

By Patrick Hornbeck

…s, especially those 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, c…

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

By Diane Winston

…ew York’s Greenwich Village, were barely noted by the mainstream news. The Times’ piece was on page thirty-three and the Daily News’ story ran on page thirty. Coverage expanded in the 1970s as gays and lesbians lobbied for civil rights and social acceptance. In 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association withdrew its classification of homosexuality as a “mental illness,” the change was widely reported as were the growing number of cities that…

Malta Adopts Marriage Equality Over Objections of Catholics and Evangelicals; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…eo-Nazi groups are among those who reportedly took part in the protests. A number of people were injured during the clashes. Activists also claimed they were attacked by religious groups on the street who accused them of pedophilia and used homophobic slurs against them. The Chilean LGBTI movement has held public demonstrations for nearly two decades, but Monday’s clashes are the first time the police have made arrests at them. Representatives of…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…the best days of the United Church of Christ are ahead of us.” What do the best days look like in a time of managing what you’ve called “diminishment”? For me, it is important to see the 1957 merger that created the United Church of Christ—not as the establishment of an institutional expression of the church or the creation of a new denominational identity, but as the birth of a movement. In “The Basis of Union,” our founders wrote the following:…

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

By Julie Ingersoll

…ad heard that there were plans to put me on the list of speakers. I bought tickets… then there was a mix up… and I was cut from the list, if I had indeed been on a list… but I had some Christians who expressed concern…. and then I read your article and I… decided it would be best for me to wait and see how things play themselves out. Howse asked if Beck’s apparent view that “we all pray to the same God” isn’t by definition false teaching. Cameron…

Is There Hope for a Truly Progressive Evangelicalism? An Interview with Deborah Jian Lee

By Eric C. Miller

…he cancer that had crawled across his body, had lain in bed at home with a phone against his ear while my pastor, who had called him from the pulpit, pointed a cordless phone toward the congregation; we all wept and sang him love songs as he lay dying. These are uniquely evangelical experiences that shaped me, that will always be a part of me. I still long for this kind of community—the kind that journeys together through all the peaks and valleys…

Telling the World a ‘Big Story’: RD in Conversation with Karen Armstrong

By Laurie Patton

…’s traditions. This movement is impressive in that it seems to combine the best of education about religion with the best of a commitment to a different kind of spiritual practice that both embraces and transcends particular traditions. How has it been working so far? This is going to be a very long process. I do not expect people to turn themselves around immediately! And in many ways, compassion is counterintuitive to our Western culture, which…