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Gay Men Detained and Killed in Chechnya, and More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nly gay former US ambassador to the country. The New York Times profiled a number of everyday people, Muslims and Christians, who are taking part in legal challenges to the Trump administration overs its executive orders banning entry into the U.S. from a number of countries. Paul Harrison, an American man engaged to an Iranian man is among the individuals profiled: Like the other plaintiffs, the couple veer between dread and hope with each succes…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…

The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

By Maren Haynes

…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…

In the Aftermath of the “Himalayan Tsunami”

By Luke Whitmore

…(first as Uttaranchal) in 2000, the region has seen a massive rise in the number of visitors to the region, especially by the growing Indian middle class. Roads widened and hotels and visitor services grew exponentially. Building a new hotel or a restaurant by the side of the road felt like a smart investment—even when the road was near a river. Kedarnath saw the building of new cell phone towers, a railway reservation office, helicopter landing…

In This Week’s LGBT Recap: Are Gay Priests Overdue for a Stonewall Moment?

By Peter Montgomery

…sure order. Xenia Loutchenko, a Moscow commentator who writes on church affairs, says Putin and an inner Orthodox circle are driving the air of social retrenchment, not any grass-roots desire for a sterner, more judgmental Russia. “There is a demand for an ideology, and they’re beginning to build one,” she said. “I don’t think it reflects in any way what the society wants. More likely it reflects the ideological sentiment higher up.” The story als…

To the One-Percenters, With Love

By Garret Keizer

…lose to fun. Lunatic fringe stuff, right? But consider this: if Communist China could turn into a capitalist powerhouse seemingly overnight, what is to prevent the United States from having its version of a Red Guard Cultural Revolution seemingly overnight? And don’t answer that the Chinese aren’t as sophisticated as we are. If that’s true, how come they’re holding the mortgage? God forbid that we ever experience such a nightmare as the C…

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided Explores the Dark Side of Positive Thinking

By Michelle Goldberg

…se—his colleagues were urged to fight for sales as hard as he’d fought for air. Rather than offering a refuge from the acquisitive creed of positive thinking, much of the evangelical world has embraced it, though not as egregiously as pentecostals have in the prosperity gospel, which holds that God rewards positive thinking with material riches. In one of the book’s most effective, maddening chapters, Ehrenreich travels to prosperity preacher Joel…

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Jihadis?

By Haroon Moghul

…7 more: 1) Hirsi Ali describes the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim advocacy group which has opposed her work, as “an organization subsequently blacklisted as a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates.” Exactly. 2) “Muslims … use cell phones and computers without necessarily seeing a conflict between their religious faith and the rationalist, secular mindset that made modern technology possible.” Driving on an inte…

I Know Why a Rain Dance Won’t End The Drought

By Johnny P. Flynn

…he Coconino Plateau (7000’) and the San Francisco Peaks (13,000’+) the hot air off the desert and the cool air of the high mountains cause thunderstorms to form. These storms move from the southwest to the northeast right toward the Hopi reservation in north-central Arizona. The weather pattern, called the ‘monsoon’ in Arizona, is predictable (monsoon actually comes from the Arabic word for season). Arizona’s monsoon may deposit only a few tenths…