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Of God, But Not God: A Methodist Minister Speaks About Church’s Refusal to Open Its Doors to LGBT

By Joel Pitney

…ere not companionship-based. They were economic arrangements. Okay, that’s number 1. Number 2, let’s say that your wife didn’t provide you with a male offspring. A man could take another wife and another wife and another wife until one of them did. This is the “sanctity of marriage” that is being protected. Are you kidding me? Wow. Okay, so that’s Old Testament. Then along comes Jesus. Well for those of us who follow Jesus, I always like to point…

Behind a Recent Stunt in Idaho Lies a Dangerous Theocratic Movement

By Chrissy Stroop

…ess of a government that both failed to protect and overstepped at crucial times in the history of the Saints.” Seen in the light of LDS history, she explained, “the libertarian political ideologies of the Bundys” are “not a radical departure from Mormonism.” To be sure, many anti-government extremists do not view themselves as anti-government. As Rosetti relates, “When we asked Ryan Bundy about his views, he recoiled at the sentiment that he is ‘…

Spiritual McCarthyism and the Catholic Vote

By Bill Berkowitz

…bsite of the Catholic National Advisory Council, and after plac[ing] three phone calls to his campaign … we were told … that someone would get back to us, but no one did.” Donohue noted that he “personally e-mailed [Mark] Linton [Obama’s National Catholic Outreach Coordinator] informing him of the three phone calls, requesting that he respond to my question: ‘I would like to know whether the Catholic National Advisory Council for Sen. Obama is sti…

How Muslim Civic Activism Helped Pass California’s Prop 47

By Nick Street

…r pledge cards and enlist volunteers to canvass potential voters and staff phone banks. He said that the positive responses to his phone pitch for Prop 47 were an unexpected surprise. “It’s been amazing to see how many people were supporting this,” Hakim said. “There are more people that think about justice than I realized!” The momentum for collaborative Muslim faith-based activism around Prop 47 began to build earlier this year, when Jawaid and…

Gay Marriage Supporters Rally People of Faith for Washington’s November Vote

By Nicole Neroulias

…ch of Christian denominations working with us now.” Discussions during the phone bank covered the Golden Rule, whether the Leviticus view of homosexuality as an abomination also extended to eating shrimp, and how civil marriage licenses are distinct from religious weddings. Most of the calls lasted mere seconds, with people not home or not interested. After an hour working the phones, Scott Holley, 33, cheerfully noted that he had become “unfazed…

Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…roblem also lies with the director Larry Charles and whatever half-baked research team they assembled; and while Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are all susceptible to the same critique, in these pages I’ll confine myself to Religulous.) This is the kind of thing a fair number of my students, raised in the Protestant-dominated United States (even Catholics and Jews have assimilated this definition), come to university thinking about religion; the tw…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…

Thoroughly Modern Mormons

By Joanna Brooks

…prevailing sense of early 21st century LDS institutional life is that the best way to deal with such anxieties is to push through them, and that the best expression of the faith is the projection of a sense of assurance as polished and attractive as the storefronts at City Creek Mall. That’s how most Mormons plan to walk through what may very well be a season of public relations nightmares, as Romney’s GOP candidacy brings even greater scrutiny t…

The Fire This Time

By Anthea Butler

…ited States. I want to live as an expat, returning to visit my family from time to time. I won’t miss much. I won’t miss the horrible cable news, or the sanctimonious preachers, or the respectability blacks who wish we’d all just get out of the streets and stop protesting. I won’t miss the well-meaning white people who try to commiserate, but won’t have a substantive conversation, or commit to fighting for justice and equality for brown and black…

A Tale of Religious Tolerance… On Reddit

By Joanna Piacenza

…nd legacy will remain: and, by not focusing on the physical beauty, I have time to cultivate those inner virtues and hopefully, focus my life on creating change and progress for this world in any way I can. After watching his mobile upload turn against him, “european_douchebag” finally apologized to the online community, Kaur, Sikhs in general and anyone else who might have taken offense to his posting. Reddit in search of mindless memes beware: b…