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7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…ldless. LEADING WHILE FEMALE Elaine Howard Ecklund: Even with an increased number of women working in the sociology of religion, there aren’t many women who are named chairs in universities. The number of women in the sociology of religion who hold tenure track jobs, earn tenure, get published, and get cited is not changing as fast as we would expect, giving that we are seeing gender parity in terms of who earns a graduate degree. There are conver…

Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…first Pride parade took place in Hanoi a little more than a year later. A number of popular Vietnamese television shows now feature gay characters. The Vietnamese Ministry of Justice in June 2013 proposed a bill that would have allowed same-sex couples to marry and extended rights to gays and lesbians who live together. Lawmakers earlier this year approved a measure to amend the country’s marriage and family law, but it did not include provisions…

Raelians’ “Clitoraid” Met With Suspicion in Burkina Faso

By Joseph Laycock

…r of fund raising projects, including an “Adopt a Clitoris” campaign and a number of partnerships with companies that make vibrators. This funding was used to recruit and fund a team of surgeons (who are not Raelians) and to establish a “pleasure hospital” in Burkina Faso. There is some controversy as to what percentage of women who undergo the surgery will be able to experience orgasms as Clitoraid, claims. But so far, Clitoraid has received much…

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…

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…what’s going on, but too few seem capable of saying it. We now have a fair number of political and civic leaders who are willing to say the word trauma and talk about the all-pervasive violence in this culture, not to mention the extent of mental disturbance and the fact that American civilians have more assault rifles in their possession than does the U.S. military. All well and good. But we have too few leaders who will talk about the deeper roo…

Union Busting for God: Catholic Colleges Invoke “Religious Freedom” to Violate Catholic Teaching

By Kaya Oakes

…their addresses to faculty, borrowing moves from a standard anti-union playbook.” Instead of allowing unionization, DePaul created an “adjunct faculty task force” that would bargain on behalf of adjuncts, but “without any legal obligation for the administration to act on the results of these negotiations or any incentive to maintain any changes that are made.” According to the adjunct I interviewed, SEIU, the union working at DePaul, “saw a losing…

Leper Messiah: A Jesus Freak’s Search for the Meaning of Bowie—A Critical Novella

By Mark Dery

…to have to confront.” 8 _________________________ Notes: 1. Quoted in the booklet accompanying the Rykodisc expanded re-release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1990), unnumbered page. 2. George Tremlett, David Bowie: Living on the Brink, 20. 3. Marc Spitz, Bowie: A Biography (New York, NY: Crown, 2009), 301. 4. Chris O’Leary, “Silly Boy Blue,” Pushing Ahead of the Dame, September 19, 2009, . 5. Marc Spitz, Bowie:…

How to Make Nones and Lose Money: Study Shows Cost of Catholic Sex Abuse Scandals

By Kaya Oakes

…al, leaving the American church with a massive money problem and shrinking numbers of parishioners on the eve of Pope Francis’ arrival. A recent study by Nicholas Bottan and Ricardo Perez-Trugila in the Journal of Public Economics revealed that, unsurprisingly, “a scandal causes a persistent decline in the local Catholic affiliation and church attendance.” “Some Catholics join other religious denominations during the first three years after a scan…

Religious Practices on Trial in Arizona: The Problem With “Experts”

By Johnny P. Flynn

…alin shared her view that the Obama presidency could shore up sagging poll numbers by invading Iran. Fertility experts have brought us the “Octomom,” and experts on the meaning of the biblical decree to “go forth and multiply” have TV viewers goggle-eyed over the nearly score of Duggar children in Arkansas. In following the Ray story over the past few months, I am amazed at the number of non-Indian sweat lodge experts the media has been able to lo…

Are We Entering the End Times for Mainline Seminaries?

By Elesha Coffman

…s in both the number of churches that could support such positions and the number of people eager to take the more challenging, but lower paying, church jobs that remained. Some seminaries shifted their missions to serve the academy or society more broadly, while others trained more part-time, second-career and lay pastors. These shifts were less abrupt than decisions to close or merge a seminary, but they were often quite jarring for faculty and…