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Along Came a Spider: What the Pope Doesn’t See

By Anthea Butler

…ts” to commence on July 19 of this year, the day devoted to prayer for the sanctification of priests, anything but sanctification is happening. May I suggest the hierarchy of the Catholic Church start anew by taking a page from the Episcopal diocese in Philadelphia? The diocese has deposed Bishop Bennington from office, and rejected a request for a new trial regarding his concealment of his brother John Bennington’s abuse of an underage girl 35 ye…

Debunking the Myth That Democracy Is “Incompatible” With Islam

By Asma Afsaruddin

…ed a sample representing over 90% of the world’s total Muslim inhabitants) categorically established that democracy is the preferred system of government among them. Disenchantment with US policy in the Middle East and the campaign to “promote” democracy under Western military occupation in Iraq, for example, did not dampen the desire of these populations to elect their own representative governments through fair and transparent elections. At the…

New Poll: Evangelicals Backing Trump

By Daniel Schultz

…hat black Protestants oppose Trump 89-8, which is nearly the 93-6 edge African-Americans in general gave Obama over Romney. Likewise, Hispanic Catholics favor Clinton 77-16, compared to the overall 71-27 Hispanic vote in 2012. Since both those groups are projected to make up the same portion of the electorate in 2016, if not larger, it might not be white evangelicals or Nones who determine the outcome this November. Don’t look now, Lucy: Charlie B…

Black Churches are Burning: Is It the 1990s All Over Again?

By Katie Day

…ng of another wave of racist violence targeting the spiritual homes of African-American Christians? On June 30, a seventh church fire, at 100-year-old Mt. Zion AME Church in Greeleyville, S.C., was a devastating repeat of history. In 1995, two members of the Ku Klux Klan burnt Mt. Zion to the ground almost exactly 20 years ago to the day of last month’s blaze. Once again Mt. Zion has been reduced to ashes, but the FBI says the likely cause of last…

A Secret History of Satan

By W. Scott Poole

…d even, in some cases public policy. The book makes the case that a significant number of Americans believe in the same Devil believed in by Puritan preachers and 19th-century evangelists. This cannot be dismissed. Its essential to understand why this is so, what historical conditions gave rise to this phenomenon and what does it tell us about the United States. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I had several groups in mind, a…

The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon

By Nathan Schneider

…nge of our age. Another outgrowth of the Enlightenment, too, is the historical-critical scholarship on the Gospels. How much was that a part of your process? Not much. I revere that kind of scholarship, and I looked at it just to make sure I wasn’t being a jerk, but it wasn’t feeding the appetite I was interested in. It wasn’t explaining the ridiculous powers that this character of Jesus has. Why is he such a hit? People went to fundamentalism and…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…s name to be valid. Woolsey suggests Merkel’s opposition may reflect political caution as much as personal belief, but notes that public opinion is moving in the direction of marriage equality: In January, Germany’s Anti-Discrimination Agency surveyed citizens to find that 83 percent are now for same-sex marriage. Even within the CDU there is movement. The newly-elected premier of Schleswig-Holstein, Daniel Günther, a staunch Catholic, recently ca…

The Quixotic Task of Debunking David Barton

By Paul Harvey

…by rigged rules, and engaging in debates with those whose projects are basically political and entrepreneurial rather than intellectual, do we feed the very beast we are trying to tame? I pondered these questions while reading Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter’s excellent, blow-by-blow refutation of David Barton’s take on Jefferson, Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President. The authors are professed evangelic…

Pastor Convicted in Lisa Miller Child Kidnapping Case

By Peter Montgomery

…d that as he drove home from the border, Mr. Zodhiates tried to call a cellphone number registered to Liberty Counsel, an evangelical legal group. That cellphone number has sometimes been used by Mathew D. Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel, dean of the Liberty University Law School in Lynchburg, Va., and a leader of Ms. Miller’s defense team. The RICO filed by Jenkins includes information that RD readers learned last year from Sarah Posner’s…

Global Religious Right Asks ‘How Far Can We Get?’; And More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nservatives decry ‘surrender before the Zeitgeist” A self-described “polemical Catholic Royalist blog” complained about the baptism in the Cathedral of Curitiba of adoptive children of gay parents. “The media gave overall impression that the Church had changed its attitude to homosexuality (tacitly). There was no contradiction or a critical word about the life of the ‘parents’ from the Church leaders obliged to say something. The conservative blog…