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What Will Orthodox ‘Republicanity’ Look Like?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…that Democrats need to get better at telling stories than at crunching the numbers, in this battle of the budget, the numbers actually matter. Hell, it’s a fight about numbers. And balance. And the virtue of justice. What this latest budget battle, and the question of raising the debt ceiling, and the straw polls are revealing, is just how Tertullian a wing of the Republican Party has become. It not only offers absurd arguments with a straight fac…

Orthodox TV Channel Offers Gays One-Way Ticket Out of Russia; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…at’ to Polish identity.” Russia: Orthodox TV channel offers to buy one-way tickets to help gay people leave country Tsargrad TV, a channel affiliated with right-wing Russian Orthodox activists and modeled after Fox News, offered to pay for a one-way ticket overseas for gay people who want to emigrate. The channel was funded by Konstantin Maofeev, a billionaire known as “God’s oligarch” who dreams of Vladimir Putin becoming a Tsar. More from the BB…

Is Joel Osteen, Success Mag Cover Boy, Really “God’s Best”?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…nd soul, and our neighbor as ourselves. A life like this often results in worldly poverty—which is the definition of “failure” in the world’s eyes. Jesus would not recognize Osteen’s brand of preaching and most likely would denounce it as false—a whitewashed tomb. Osteen, though, is no fool. He knows that preaching on controversial topics can get you into trouble. It cost Jesus his life, after all, and how can you enjoy all your wealth, formal liv…

Necessary Sacrifice: Sundance, Mormon Movies, and the Race to Oscar Night

By Kathryn Lofton

…he screen, the muted gaping crowd) is the set of a communal inevitability. Tickets pay producers to slaughter others so we may, if possible, evade (for now) our innocent death. What LDS knows, and Sundance doesn’t, is that there’s no reason to press our nose into human filth. The minute we sat down, we were already at Nixzmary’s deathbed. To attend a screening is to attend a sacrifice. In less celebrated contexts, Milan Kundera mutters: “The broth…

London Calling: “Our Great War Is a Spiritual War”

By Elizabeth Drescher

…rival West Midland fans in 2010, loosing England its bid to host the 2018 World Cup. Nonetheless, responses to such events that ignore the underlying issues they express—that would see soccer-related violence, like the uprisings this week, simply as ferociously bad manners that can be corrected by cutting off social media access—invite more of the same. Absent religious institutions, soccer grounds, or other outlets as sites for organized repressi…

I Miss Tina Fey

By Julie Ingersoll

…half. There were still probably 80 empty seats, and it was clear that some number of attendees had free tickets. The largest financial supporter of the event was a local news/talk radio station and its representatives were the only media allowed in. As I arrived with my Religion Dispatches press badge they stopped me before I even got to the door. I chatted with an AP reporter and he said AP had been trying for weeks to gain media access—but that…

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…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…titution to an arbitrarily chosen group of people. Go on. Try it. All the world’s Chinese, all the world’s Indians, all the world’s lefthanded people, all the world’s cyclists. It might make sense for Dawkins to think he can opine on the contributions of a civilization—though Trinity College would demand you have a degree in a subject before dismissing it altogether. It makes sense too for a scientist to think science is fair ground for such a fat…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…Heavenly Father sent him to Uganda instead of his favorite place on Earth—Orlando! The recurring musical outbursts about Orlando, Florida, were for me the funniest parts of the show. There are indeed striking similarities between Temple Square and Disney World: the fantasy-castle architecture; the immaculate, artificial neatness; the perky helpfulness of “cast members”/missionaries; the imagineering and the edutainment in service of a well-groome…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…