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Conservative Bishops Unhappy At Synod, But Ignore Walkout Call; Australian Religious Leaders Step Up Marriage Equality Opposition; Italy Debates Civil Unions; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…rriage equality, telling an annual gathering of church leaders that “the virulent challenge to the definition of marriage” reflects that “antagonism of the world to the word of God.” “We need to be courageous in our discussions both in private and in public, yet we also need to be sensitive and loving in our defence of biblical truth. “Yes, it will kindle criticism, provoke ridicule, and invite hatred … yet such hatred should not silence us.” Davi…

What We Really Talk About When We Talk About Health Care

By Douglas Harrison

…with blood from time to time) to a protest outside a recent presidential forum on health care. Interviewing the guy later on Hardball, Chris Matthews was baffled by this, but it makes a certain, scary sense to me. Having spent a lifetime immersed in the fundamentalist evangelical culture of rural America (first as a Southern Baptist, later as a scholar of religious culture), I’m convinced that all the sound and fury generated by the health care de…

Watch the New Birth Throne: Eddie Long Declared ‘King’ by ‘Rabbi’

By Anthea Butler

…agery to affirm and elevate a leader who had admittedly broken the sacred trust between pastor and congregant.” Very true. Eddie Long’s continued pandering to keep the remnants of his deluded flock intact has no bounds. In fact, Long is King of his Lithonia Campus, subject to no authority. There is no church hierarchy to sit him down, no one to tell him that he is theologically incorrect. I hope that the full story of what he did to the young men…

Yerushalmi, National Review, and a Conservative Fight Over Shari’ah

By Sarah Posner

…s a part of an ongoing intra-conservative battle over Islamophobia. In his latest post at National Review, Schmitz writes, logically dismantling Yerushalmi’s panic: It remains the case that anti-sharia activists have identified a grand total of seven cases in 35 years in which American courts have allegedly enforced sharia or other foreign-law based judgments. In none of them were the serious injustices that advocates of anti-sharia laws typically…

Obama Administration Gives Free Pass for Faith-Based Groups to Discriminate

By Sarah Posner

…ing the certificates of exemption. The 2007 OLC memo is also known as the “World Vision memo,” after the faith-based organization which receives millions in federal funds, and requires all US employees to sign its Christian Statement of Faith and/or The Apostles Creed. World Vision’s president, Richard Stearns, has been an outspoken critic of ending what is euphemistically known as “co-religionist hiring,” and has a coalition of conservative faith…

God is My Co-Belligerent: Avatar Priests, Hijacked Theologians, and Other Figures of Right-Wing Revolt

By Frederick Clarkson

…ge Robert Bork. McCloskey also famously accompanied then-Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) to Rome for the canonization of Opus Dei founder Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer in 2002. McCloskey is a member of Opus Dei, and once headed the Catholic Information Center. McCloskey recently published an update of his essay. “I—or perhaps my thesis” he wrote, “received quite a bit of vitriolic criticism from the elite mainstream media and even from the late Tim…

Ex-Gay Groups Go Back to the Future

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…kingdom of God and thrown into hell. Gagnon’s verbose reaction belies the truth that “reparative” therapy is finally on its last legs, condemned by every reputable psychological organization and propped up only by discredited studies from the likes of de-certified Paul Cameron and the work of Robert Spitzer, who recently disavowed his own research. Chambers is simply the latest “ex-gay” to realize he isn’t. Exodus’ founder Michael Bussee discovere…

A Journalist in Church, Hiding in Plain Sight

By Andre Tartar

…ern-day Apostle (as Valdemiro Santiago, miracle curer and head of Brazil’s World Church of God’s Power, proclaims himself), I momentarily implored God for a miracle for my mother, who six months ago survived the latest in a harrowing series of medical ordeals. With that little bit of prayerful business out of the way, I turned from the ecstatic mob of Santiago-rushing crentes and walked down the darkened block, gripping my scuffed iPhone and retur…

Theology Fail in Christian Statement on Israel, Judaism, Palestine

By Adam Gregerman

…Israeli policies, the authors gather historical examples of unprecedented brutality as parallels. These extreme examples not only foreclose constructive dialogue but in some cases sever Jews’ connections to their own history. For example, the authors look to antiquity, a time of tragic Jewish subjugation, when Jews suffered under “imperial rule” and faced threats to their “economic survival and physical health.” Yet they then cast modern Jews as t…

The Contraceptive Mandate and Animal Suffering

By Frances Kissling

…sychologically or physically. Nothing says that other nonprofits could not run those hospitals as well or with as much care for the poor as the Catholics do; we do not have a lock on goodness. Singer’s position reminds me of one taken by Dan Maguire in a speech at Georgetown on Catholic education. Dan suggested that perhaps it was time for the Catholics to get out of the education business if they could not fully respect academic freedom. He note…