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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…

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

By Patrick Hornbeck

…and nuns, Christian and otherwise, live in monasteries and convents; and a number of historic Protestant churches, 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…

Milquetoast Liberal Religion Won’t Challenge Conservative Values: A History Lesson

By Sheila D. Collins

…arge part of the Great Plains, restored wildlife and built a system of over 800 state and county parks. They electrified an entire region of the country, bringing what had been America’s “Third World” up to 20th century standards. They created works of art, gave concerts, set up theaters throughout the country, ran nursery schools, served over 1.2 billion school lunches to needy children, gave immunizations, taught illiterate adults to read and wr…

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…

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

By Julie Ingersoll

While a number of conservative Christian leaders raise questions about Glenn Beck’s Mormonism, Worldview Matters’ host Brannon Howse continued his attack in a conversation with Kirk Cameron about why Cameron did not participate in Glenn Beck’s Divine Destiny. Howse marveled at the “thick irony” wherein Cameron (the actor who played Buck, the converted journalist warning about the “demonic spirituality of a one world religion” in the Left Behind m…

Not that Kind of Fundamentalist Memoir

By Mandy Van Deven

…makes impossible demands of herself. She seeks infallibility from God, her partner, and her friends, and is disappointed to continually discover all are rife with flaw and contradiction; that there is no “right” way to be a Christian or a writer (Bauer’s other passion), a sentiment that goes against her rigid upbringing. I found myself wondering if Bauer could have maintained her childhood faith if those to whom she went for guidance hadn’t been s…

Democrats Look to Conservative Evangelicals on Immigration

By Sarah Posner

…parishes. Shirley Constantino Tan lives in Pacifica, California, with her partner Jaylynn Mercado, who is a US citizen, and their two teenage sons, both US citizens. Tan fled her native Philippines in 1991, seeking political asylum after her family was victimized by violence stemming from a family dispute over an inheritance; a cousin murdered her sister and mother and shot Tan in the head. Tan and Mercado have been together for 24 years and, she…

Dialogue or Demonization? Where Gays are Concerned, Focus on the Family Wants it Both Ways

By Cody J. Sanders

…o assistance to students who wish to listen to the views of their dialogue partners. When the (LGBT) dialogue partner is constructed as the “enemy” whose way of being in the world is fundamentally evil, corrupt, pathological or anti-Christian, there is really no need to dialogue. Since the language of “threat to freedom in America,” the corrosion of “constitutionally protected rights,” and “full-scale attack” is the language typically used when tr…

Preaching to the ‘Moveable Middle’: Bishop Gene Robinson on Marriage Equality and the Election

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…as there a long time ago, but he was being advised to be very careful. My partner, Mark and I got a wonderful note from him when we had our civil union—that was two years before we got marriage equality (in New Hampshire). In the note he talked about what his relationship with Michelle had meant to him and that he wished the same for me and Mark. It was an amazing thing. The big thing that I think was accomplished hasn’t been talked about. We saw…

Unintended Consequences: Overturning Roe v. Wade May Endanger This Cherished Evangelical Practice

By R.L. Stollar

…right to use contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut), the right to marry a partner regardless of race (Loving v. Virginia), the right to marry a partner regardless of sex (Obergefell v. Hodges), the right to be free from compulsory sterilization (Skinner v. Oklahoma), and the right to be free from government-mandated surgery (Winston v. Lee). One only needs to look around the world to see what the ADF has planned next for the United States, which…