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Welcome to the Gayborhood: Jason Brown on This New Era

By The Editors

…be featuring special remarks from the show’s guests that reveal how their worldview has changed in this new era. In 2013, Jason Brown was a queer student at Biola University, a conservative evangelical college that prohibits “homosexual behavior.” For a time, he co-led an anonymous LGBTQ club called the Biola Queer Underground (now Biolans’ Equal Ground). Back then, Deborah interviewed him for her book Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women a…

The Invention of a Corporate Christian America

By Andrew Aghapour

…sive. The public blamed them for the Great Crash and the New Deal had constructed a new regulatory state and empowered labor unions, two developments that corporate America readily resented. Business leaders quickly resolved to win back the public and devoted millions of dollars to a massive campaign of public relations, redirecting traditional business lobbies like the National Association of Manufacturers to the cause and creating brand new ones…

Religious Kids Are More Selfish: The Stickers Don’t Lie

By Michael Schulson

…tual and religiousness are wildly different than those held in the Western world. In other words, you have to take this fragile Western construct (religion), put a numerical scale on it, and then apply that scale around the world, as if religion were a solid, universally measurable thing, like the force of gravity or the density of water. Judging by the paper, Decety and his colleagues haven’t even recognized this problem, let alone addressed it….

New LDS Handbook Cements Anti-Trans Policy—And it Doesn’t Make a Whole Lot of Sense

By Kelli D. Potter

…always been anti-queer and anti-trans, although often only implicitly. I knew that I couldn’t be my authentic self in the Mormon world. They wouldn’t accept me as a girl/woman. So, I stayed in the closet until I finally left. With the release of its new handbook for those in church leadership positions, the LDS Church is finally getting more explicit about their beliefs and practices concerning transgender folk. With respect to membership status,…

Why Are Some Muslims Calling to Replace GMT with Mecca Time?

By Salman Hameed

…e.” In fact, he goes on to say, “That’s why if someone travels to Mecca or lives there, he lives longer, is healthier, and is less affected by the earth’s gravity. You get charged with energy.” All of these claims are complete bunk. For example, even if one assumes that there is a special alignment with the northern magnetic field, the position of the magnetic north changes every year. It is currently in northern Canada and moving towards Russia a…

Methodists Move Toward LGBT Inclusion

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ington Conference of the United Methodist Church narrowly approved a groundbreaking same-sex marriage resolution.” The resolution, passed at the church’s annual local conference, would amend the church’s Book of Discipline to allow pastors to perform same-sex marriages and ceremonies in member churches in jurisdictions where legislatures already have approved gay marriage laws, such as the District. The measure was not expected to pass by its spon…

A Debate Rages in India Over Conversion, Secularism, and “Spiritual Violence”

By Murali Balaji

…rely come under scrutiny, save for an occasional piece in outlets like the New York Times. Moreover, aggressive proselytizing by Christian groups has actually increased, including attempts at converting Hindu temple-goers right outside the temple doors. To be sure, from a distance, it would appear that India’s religious minorities might suffocate from the weight of a nearly 80 percent Hindu population. But Hindu majoritarianism in India isn’t just…

Religion and Gender Trouble in the Black Arts: Remembering Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman

By Josef Sorett

…onstitute community offered an intriguing counter to “hard and fixed gender assignments,” Bambara suggested. Such a shift would be a welcome improvement over gender troubles, which resulted from colonial pasts and continued to frustrate black social life. Toni Cade Bambara encouraged the construction of new myths and the cultivation of a revolution within the self as important methods for dismantling both racism and sexism. In the midst of a “by a…

The Journalist and the Bishops: CNS Editor Fired For Tweeting Opposition to LGBT Discrimination

By Patricia Miller

…ed gay marriage in GOP talking points, fooling no one.” The USCCB owns and runs the Catholic News Service, but officially CNS is editorially independent from the bishops’ conference and provides news to both secular and religious outlets. In reality, however, it’s always existed in a somewhat liminal space journalistically speaking, combining fundamentally solid reporting with a pro-hierarchy tilt in story selection, heavy on stories that feature…

Immigration in Our Lovely Deseret

By Joanna Brooks

…rtedly drafting state legislation modeled on Arizona’s SB 1070—the Deseret News, a daily newspaper owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, today published a worthy feature article “Fact or fiction? The myths and realities of illegal immigration” presenting fact-based findings by four Deseret News reporters addressing and in several cases debunking the alleged impacts of undocumented immigration on crime, employment, education, ta…