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When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

By Colin Chapell

…ge how they understand their own identity. If academic achievement and the number or type of initials after your name is the most important thing in the world to you, then it will change how you view your own masculinity and femininity. Similarly, if having children matters most to you, then you can only be truly “manly” or “feminine” if you have kids. Is there anything you had to leave out? Historians always want to include every interesting anec…

Renovating Marriage, One Gay Couple at a Time

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ose marriage equality on religious grounds. For them, I point to a growing number of religious leaders who also understand that gays and lesbians can do a lot to “redefine” marriage in beneficial ways. Rev. Ed Bacon, who leads the 4,000 member All Saints Church in Pasadena, Calif., told Oprah Winfrey this past weekend that marriage would be “enriched” by same-sex couples. I’ve never had a straight couple come to me and say, ‘My marriage is in trou…

Sacred&Profane: The Living Dead

By Gary Laderman

…oked. There are ghosts and graves in the yards of my neighborhood, and the number of skeletons—reclining on lawn chairs, sprouting up from the ground, beckoning from the shadows—has transformed the suburban landscape into a set for a George Romero film. In addition, and beyond bland suburbia, monsters, ghosts, skeletons, vampires, and other playful dead inhabit stores and sell products, entertain across the television dial, and instill a dreadfull…

Pop Culture Yogi B. K. S. Iyengar Dead at 95

By Andrea R. Jain

…the lifting of immigration restrictions to much of Western Europe and the United States, resulting in an influx of Indian gurus ready and eager to deliver yoga to a counterculture grasping for something radically opposed to what they perceived as the puritanical, body-negating Protestantism of their upbringing. Iyengar was a part of a much larger movement of Indian gurus—including Muktananda of Siddha Yoga, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of Transcendental…

UNESCO on Religion, Culture and SOGI in Asia; Orthodox Family Sues to Stop Cremation of Israeli Trans Woman; Struggles of Iraqi Queer Activists; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…used to receive threats but in recent years they had grown to an enormous number. My public activities resulted in promises to hunt me down, beat me up, and kill me. Neo-Nazis, homophobes and pro-Putin agitators showered me with insults on social networks, harassed me on the phone and at events, and even complained to my place of work. On 24 August 2014, Ukrainian Independence Day, myself and some friends who were in a picket on Malaya Sadovaya s…

Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

By Christine Ryan

…aw. Religious exemptions from abortion bans offer relief to only a limited number of individuals and can never be a comprehensive legal solution to the country’s reproductive health crisis. Nor should the right to control one’s body depend on proof of one’s religious commitments; reproductive freedom is a right that depends on one’s humanity, not one’s religious beliefs. That said, attacking the status quo incrementally proved to be a winning stra…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…ch he bashed the secular world, his meeting with abuse victims here in the United States, and the whining about the press giving him a bad rap, this Pope is toast. Whether he resigns or not, his Papacy legacy is in tatters historically, unless he can pull off an amazing change of heart, and language. At 83 years of age, that is hard to do. At the very least he should certainly heed the calls for an emergency synod to deal with the scope of the sca…

What Do ‘The Christians’ Believe? Easter Reflections from a Non-Christian

By Gary Laderman

…e in America, though the contours and composition of this tradition in the United States have been and are currently shaped by patterns of immigration. The arrival of Irish Catholics in the nineteenth century had an enormous impact on neighborhoods, local politics, and church membership; today and in the future, Hispanic Catholics will make an impact on the life of the Church, ranging from an increase in bilingual services to intensified debates o…

Lo and Behold, the Sacredness of the Internet

By Martyn Smith

…internet as a result of the inexorable working out of Moore’s Law. As the number of transistors on a chip grew exponentially, computers became smaller, and then they became “personal,” and then they fit in our pockets as a phone. “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing,” at the Computer History Museum In this telling, the internet was not a unique “Columbus” event, but an evolution dependent on the shrinking size and growing capacity of co…

Holy Father, You’re Not Helping: The Problem with the Pope’s Plan to Consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

By Katherine Kelaidis

…o Orthodox Christianity. The Pope’s decision to carry out the consecration service dates to a series of appearances of the Virgin Mary reported by three shepherd children in the small village of Fatima, Portugal between the spring 1916 and the autumn of 1917. During the appearance, the children received a series of prophecies and requests, among them that Russia (then in the midst of the Bolshevik Revolution) would be consecrated to the Immaculate…