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Sex and the (Hipster) Church—Just a Gimmick?

By Nicole Greenfield

…at a shock show worked at Hillsong NYC, the bright-lights and big-worship year-old plant of a network of Australian Pentecostal churches. “Some things were a little cheesy,” Nancy Mickel, a 30-year-old Hillsong member, admits. “But in the real world, sex does come up. It’s good to know where we should stand.” From Spectacle to Conversation At hipster churches at the other end of the spectrum, churches that have embraced a more relaxed and egalita…

Russia Expels Gay American Pastor, An Epidemic of Anti-LGBT Violence in Brazil, And More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…sodomy challenge Activists in Belize have been waiting for more than three years for Chief Justice Kenneth Benjamin to deliver a judgment in the United Belize Action Movement’s challenge to the country’s sodomy laws. The court had announced that the ruling would be delivered on July 27, but on that day the court announced that delivery of the ruling had been postponed until August. 10. Isle of Man: First same-sex couple legally married Marc and Al…

The Tense History Behind Jimmy Carter’s Liberty U. Commencement Address

By John Fea

…o down in history as one of the greatest commencement speeches ever.” This year’s speaker was Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States. On Saturday the Liberty University community heard a commencement address from an evangelical Christian who disagrees with Trump and Falwell Jr. on almost every major policy issue of the age. Carter and the Falwell family have had an uneasy relationship over the years. Both Carter and Jerry Falwell Sr…

There Will Be a Nation

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…the ondes martenot, an early electronic synthesizer developed in 1928, one year after the film ends.) Time-space discrepancies continue through the film’s sights and sounds, culminating in the final devastating shot of the film, as Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major strikes up over a surreal scene. The 1898 setting also seems odd since what occurs at this time are simply shots of a man in a mine looking for silver. The first fifteen minutes of nonv…

Facebook Doesn’t Kill Churches, Churches Kill Churches

By Elizabeth Drescher

…s about the more narrow scope of active Facebook affiliations, despite the number of “friends” a person’s profile page might boast. With regard to churches, Beck reads the data as suggesting that Facebook and other social media are replacing what he believes is the “main draw of the traditional church: social connection and affiliation.” It’s an engaging argument. Beck is certainly right that church is no longer a central gathering place for the m…

Coming Out Twice: Sexuality and Gender in Islam

By Susan Henking

…slam in the Modern World in the Netherlands. They generously gave me a two-year fellowship. So in 2004, I left my teaching position at Swarthmore College, which I dearly loved, and moved to the Netherlands to pursue two years of research and writing. I was determined to produce a full book that would include a study of hadith and also Islamic law and ethics. Homosexuality in Islam was published only in 2010, but it was written during that two-year…

Capitalism and the Anti-Modern Pope

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…been a prominent feature of the global religious landscape since 1979: the year Jerry Falwell founded the “Moral Majority”; the year the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran; and the year John Paul II became the first non-Italian pope since the mid-1500s. Bruce Lawrence already performed an important comparative analysis of such religious anti-Modernism in 1989, in an important book called Defenders of God. In the specifically Catholic context, bot…

Inventing Jesus: An Interview with Bart Ehrman

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…hat’s one kind of source. I look at the Apostle Paul. His writings were 20 years after Jesus’ life, but Paul himself converted to be a follower of Jesus within a year or two at the latest of Jesus’ death—which means that people were telling enough stories about Jesus for Paul to convert a year or two later. All of that shows that the mythicists who claim that Jesus was made up 30 years later in Egypt, or some other claim—that simply can’t be righ…

Arrests Made in Murders of Atheist Bloggers in Bangladesh, But Int’l Response to Violence Remains Anemic

By Murali Balaji

…amicize a country in which 10 percent of the population is non-Muslim. For years, beneath the loud and proud rhetoric of Bengali unity, Bangladesh has been increasingly radicalized, particularly in rural areas and villages just outside of major cities such as Dhaka and Chittagong. Even under the nominally secular Awami League, land-grabs against groups such as Hindus and indigenous tribes have gone up, and authorities have done little to deter vio…

Mexican Bishops Exorcism Against Equality; African Bishops Oppose ‘Enemy of Human Race’; Israeli Islamic Leader Anti-Gay Op-Ed

By Peter Montgomery

…tribunal has heard.” An email circulated within the Church of England last year, after the Rev Canon Jeremy Pemberton married his partner Laurence Cunnington, reveals that the Most Rev Justin Welby asked staff at Lambeth Palace to ensure senior figures stick to a standard pre-agreed “line” if asked about the issue. They were told that the Archbishop wanted to “move the conversation on” to other subjects such as poverty. And they were urged to defl…