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Francis Must Make Changes to Have a Real Effect

By Patricia Miller

…s remained fairly steady in recent decades is “the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.,” which has masked “the large number of people who have left the Catholic church.” According to Pew, approximately one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church and 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics. If you were a business losing one-third of your customers, wouldn’t you want to make some changes? Sur…

Pope Francis Has Painted Himself into a Corner on Women Deacons

By Mary E. Hunt

…s” conundrum Parallel to the diaconal growth is the steady increase in the number of women engaged in ministries of all sorts. Whether in campus ministry or prison work, in parishes where they now outnumber priests in the U.S., in religious communities or religious education, women around the world do an increasingly large share of the Roman Catholic Church’s ministry without being ordained or having decision-making power. No wonder it occurred to…

Competing Visions of Family & Freedom at UN; Methodists Try to Avoid Schism on Sexuality; Catholic Cardinal Denounces LGBT ‘Demonic Ideology’; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ment. There is a widespread feeling that, despite impressive growth in the numbers and capacities of organizations promoting queer/LGBTIA+ issues, there has been little impact on the everyday lives of African queer/LGBTIA+ individuals and communities. Discriminatory laws and policies remain stubbornly in place in almost all countries, and the hostile public perceptions of queer/LGBTIA+ identities that sustain these laws and policies seem as pervas…

Turkey and Egypt: Islam’s Future?

By Haroon Moghul

…is genuinely impressive. I’ve spent the last few days meeting folks from a number of civil society organizations in Turkey. They’re well-organized. They have fantastic facilities. And they have the desire to push their vision of Islam globally: Eastern Europe and Central Asia where Turks have historical and cultural links respectively, as well as West Africa and South Asia. These aren’t just ordinary organizations, either. There are TV stations, i…

Will Istanbul Ever Be a Part of the European Union?

By Haroon Moghul

…of the planet—you have to go to Moscow in the north, probably Dubai in the south, central Europe in the west and probably India in the east to get this kind of economic power. It doesn’t deserve to be second fiddle to anyone, and with Turkey’s rise, I can see it playing a global role, in the near future, commensurate with its historic one. At the moment I’m overlooking the last stop on the European rail network. From here, you can go all the way t…

Water Water Everywhere

By Amina Wadud

…nt either. It is popular in parts of Muslim Africa, and in parts of Muslim Southeast Asia, but almost unheard of in the Gulf region, and in South Asia. Clearly there is more to it than religious interpretation, especially when it goes from a symbolic cutting of the tip of the clitoris to a more invasive removal of the labia major. Cutting itself has no purification value, ever, anywhere, in the rituals of purification; so clearly this is outside o…

Why Are Some Muslims Calling to Replace GMT with Mecca Time?

By Salman Hameed

…thern Canada and moving towards Russia at 40 miles per year. (The magnetic south pole is also moving in Antarctica.) So unless one wants to move Mecca at a similar speed, it may have a hard time keeping whatever alignment Youssef al-Qaradawy is talking about. The urge on the part of some to show Mecca’s specialness in a scientific idiom has nothing to do with actual science. There is a whole genre in the Muslim world of claims that modern science…

Condoms and Common Sense

By Frances Kissling

…since he or she would be violating the commandment against killing; or the South African Bishop, Kevin Dowling, who has supported condom use “in order to prevent the transmission of potential death to another.” Moderates among the clergy, and theologians who have been critical of the blanket opposition to condoms, are too numerous to mention—but even conservatives have had trouble with total opposition to condoms, most especially as it extends to…

Tony Perkins: Soldiers Will Quit if Gays Can Serve Openly

By Daniel Schultz

…ally conservative institution. It recruits heavily from rural areas in the South, the Midwest, and the Inter-Mountain states. In our larger cities, black and Hispanic recruits are encouraged to consider the military — which has historically been a great ladder of achievement for racial and ethnic minorities. These are the very areas and groups who have been most resistant to the demands of the homosexual lobby. These are the very regions and group…

Indonesia: As Volcano Erupts, a Spiritual Loss

By Mark Woodward

…and terminates on the coast. The volcano is the abode of Sunan Merapi, the southern coast is the home of Gusti Kangeng Ratu Kidul, the Queen of the Southern Ocean. Both are powerful Muslim spirits. It is understood that on the Day of Judgment at the world’s ending, a lava flow beginning at the peak of Mount Merapi will flow through Yogyakarta, destroying the Sultan’s palace and ending in Ratu Kidul’s domain in the Southern Ocean. Here, a major eru…