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The Religious Case Against Religious Discrimination in Cakeshop Case

By Patrick Hornbeck

…like Phillips’s. But, as survey after survey has demonstrated, substantial numbers of Catholics, and to a lesser extent evangelicals as well, are not following their denominations’ leaders down this particular road, and there is a growing number of religious institutions that have embraced marriage equality and advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in the public square. Cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop make it clear that the boundaries of a national settleme…

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

By Anthea Butler

…y, as many of the dioceses in the United States become uninsurable and the number of Catholic churches dwindles. As membership shrinks, the number of ordinations decreases, and the coffers dry up, perhaps the Vatican and its leadership will be forced to look at its decrepit, hierarchical structure, and fix it. I doubt it, however. Like the spider who crawled across Pope Benedict’s robes this weekend in Prague, everyone except the Pope can see the…

Contrary to Claims of Anti-Trans Muslims, LGBTQ+ Acceptance is Widespread in the History of Islam

By Ali Olomi

…ginning. Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s Kitab al-Aghani records the lives of a number of individuals including one named Tuways who lived during the last years of Muhammad and the reigns of the early Muslim dynasties. Tuways was mukhannathun: those who were born as men, but who presented as female. They are described by al-Isfahani as wearing bangles, decorating their hands with henna, and wearing feminine clothing. One mukhannathun, Hit, was even in…

Hold Your Applause: Potential Changes to Roles of Catholic Women and LGBTQ+ People May Just Be Vatican Breadcrumbing

By Mary E. Hunt

…erstandably praised the move. There’s also a provision to change the usual number of 10 men from religious congregations who can vote in synods to five women religious and five men religious. Why they’re somehow in a different category than other lay people remains unclear, but this counts as progress. Nathalie Becquart, a French woman and a member of the Congregation of Xavières, was named an undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops making her the…

Global Anti-Gay Forces Plot Against ‘Satanic’ Equality Movement

By Peter Montgomery

….” The spokesperson’s comments reportedly were in response to a story from New Zealand about a Maldivian asylum seeker in New Zealand who had become an award-winning drag queen in Wellington. Abraham Naim told the Dominio Post that he had been granted asylum in 2013 after facing persecution in the Maldives. The article quotes New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment as stating that Naim was “at risk of serious harm from state…

Ten of Our Favorite Top Tens

By The Editors

…on Time’s list, everything from the Mormons to monks rioting in Tibet, the new evangelicals, the Kosher workplace debacle—and even the Catholic church on aliens.) 2.) Heading the list of TOP TEN RELIGION STORIES FROM RELIGION NEWS WRITERS is the “Pastors Gone Wild” story. Religion journalists agree that the top story of the year was that of presidential candidates and the pastors they kept company with; Jeremiah Wright “damned” America, discredite…

Is Obama the Antichrist? Why Armageddon Stands Between the President and the Evangelical Vote

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…ts, a hidden “plan of the ages” emerges. According to their decryptions, a number of events will transpire just before the apocalypse. These include a return of the Jews to Palestine, a decline in morals, religious apostasy, and the consolidation of independent nations into one super-state led by a seemingly benevolent leader who is actually the Antichrist. During the last 100 years, evangelicals have witnessed more and more evidence of these prop…

My Womb for His Purposes: The Perils of Unassisted Childbirth in the Quiverfull Movement

By Kathryn Joyce

…the babies” themselves, both saving money and demonstrating their faith. A number of Quiverfull families follow a similar arc (as had Garrison) graduating from conventional hospital births—often where mothers felt pushed into a birth plan they didn’t desire—to midwife-assisted births at home, to the final challenge of unattended home births. It’s a logical extreme of the movement whose naturalistic bent actually overlaps with the back-to-the-land,…

Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…ng the highly regarded play-turned-HBO-movie The Laramie Project, told the New York Times that although she’d been hoping to avoid “dark, depressing subject matter” after writing about the murder of Matthew Shepard, she was drawn into the Jonestown vortex after David Dower of the Z Space Theater encouraged her to explore the tragedy. Fondakowski and her creative team began the project in 2002 and spent the subsequent three years interviewing survi…

A Secret History of Satan

By W. Scott Poole

…l. I think that they will find it useful to pair the book with some of the new cultural studies of Jesus in America by Stephen Prothero or Richard Wrightman Fox. I think that scholars of American religion will find that looking at beliefs about the Devil opens up a new way of seeing old topics, from the Great Awakening to the twentieth-century decline of mainline churches. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off? A…