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Is Change Possible? Shifting the Ex-Gay Question

By Lynne Gerber

…on, have had their gay loved ones and their partners to dinner, Christmas, Thanksgiving for many years, watched their struggles, seen the results, and are not as receptive to the idea of change that structured the movement’s salad days. Exodus’ shifts can also be attributed to the influence of its critics. To its credit, and unlike other ex-gay groups, Exodus does stay in engaged dialogue with gay and lesbian Christians and activists and has been…

RNC Takes America to Church, Mormon Style, as Rank-and-File LDS Step Up

By Joanna Brooks

…her family when their daughter was born prematurely—he even made an entire Thanksgiving dinner for the family himself—and his caring when that same daughter died two decades later. Take those three speeches. Add two prayers, three hymns, and a white-bread-and-tap-water sacrament, and that’s pretty much what a Mormon Sunday church meeting sounds and feels like. We talk about helping one another. We tear up. And we usually try to sidestep the thorn…

Undercover-ed Religion: 13 Stories That Went Missing in 2012

By Peter Laarman

…e pro-queer side. Pollster/strategy consultant Amy Simon went before large numbers of liberal Christian leaders in battleground states to say, in effect, “Please don’t duck what your own religion has to say about this. Try behaving like Jesus for once.” And Simon was only one of many out there, working hard and bringing in sheaves of religious voters for equal rights. It seems to have worked. 8. Body of this Death It wasn’t just gay bodies that go…

“I’ll Pray For You”—Powerful or Pointless?

By Christine Wicker

…, I once asked a former nun named Elizabeth Espersen, who directed Dallas’ Thanksgiving Square, to give me an example of the best prayer. Jesus had already directed Christians on how to pray, of course. Since, no one in Dallas, Texas, was going to challenge that. I was looking for second best. Elizabeth’s answer changed my entire framework for prayer. She said, “The name of God.” “And then?” I asked. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s all that’s need…

In Memoriam: Sarah Hammond

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…e world lost a brilliant young American religious history scholar over the Thanksgiving holiday. And those of us who were lucky enough to know Sarah Hammond lost a funny, quick-witted, loyal, overthinky, compassionate, scrupulous, empathetic, and delightfully nerdy presence in our lives—whether that presence was expressed in the role of friend, colleague, teacher, student, aunt, daughter, or sister. Mark Oppenheimer and Linn Tonstad have already w…

Oral Roberts, Pioneering Christian Zionist

By Shalom Goldman

…Meir Bar Ilan by going to the Yeshurun synagogue in Jerusalem to attend a thanksgiving prayer. ‘This is the first time that I have attended a synagogue in the Land of Israel,’ he noted later in his diary. He had been in the country for forty years.”* Ben Gurion’s American-born wife, Paula, was equally contentious about matters of religious observance, especially if they impinged on what she considered her domain—the kitchen of the modest Ben Guri…

Pat Robertson: No Longer a Relevant Player

By Becky Garrison

…show or a tape of that segment know exactly what he said—that it would be cheaper to assassinate Chavez than to wage a costly war against him. But no matter how you slice this baloney, God makes it pretty clear that vengeance is his business and not ours. (See Romans 12:19–21). In a few brief moments, Robertson managed to flush over two thousand years of Judeo-Christian teachings down the toilet. As I witnessed that notorious segment on The 700 C…

All the Lonely People: Holiday Blues and the Epidemic of Isolation

By Peter Laarman

…during a time characterized by heavy socialization and “cheer.” The run of Thanksgiving-to-New Year’s holidays also occur during the time of least available daylight in North America, which means that seasonal affective disorder (SAD) also plays a role in making Yuletide anything but bright for those whom Herman Melville appropriately labeled isolatoes. And now we know, thanks to new research, that loneliness is growing more widespread—indeed, tha…

How Intelligent Design Advocates Helped Shape the Christian Right’s Texas Curriculum Standards

By Lauri Lebo

…he two documents: Dunbar began the lecture by discussing a national day of thanksgiving that Gen. George Washington called for after the defeat of the British at Saratoga in 1777—showing, in her reckoning, a religious base in the thinking of the country’s founders. In developing a line of legal reasoning that the future lawyers in her class might use, she wove her way to two Supreme Court cases in the 1960s, in both of which the court ruled that p…

Invoking God’s Name Like a Bludgeon

By Lauri Lebo

…at events such as these we also take the opportunity to offer a moment of thanksgiving to God — if He exists. And I’m not here to say that He does. That would be wrong for an elected official, I am told. No matter that America’s founders invoked the name of God, and encouraged and participated in religious ceremonies in government facilities. No matter that the overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens believe, or they have no objection to rel…