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New Resource for LDS Families with Gay Children Links Acceptance and Health

By Joanna Brooks

…er science journal. The booklet released last week has been designated as “best practices” for suicide prevention. There is a very robust (if muted) conversation among LDS families about how faith obliges them to react to gay children. All the time, I hear from gay Mormons—adults—that their families do or do not permit them to participate in family activities, or to even talk about their orientation, or to bring their partners home. What does scie…

FX’s ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ Adaptation Rejects Reductive Elements of Krakauer’s Book, But Confirms That ‘Mormonism Breeds Dangerous Men’

By Benjamin E. Park

…r the Banner of Heaven appeared the very next year, immediately becoming a bestseller. The book tells the story of the grisly murders of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter, Erica, at the hands of her brothers-in-law, Ron and Dan Lafferty. Though excommunicated from the LDS church, Krakauer argues that the brothers were inspired by their religious heritage. The Laffertys were the natural culmination of 150 years of history centered on blind ob…

Pelosi Attacker’s New Age Spirituality and Belief in QAnon is no Contradiction

By Susannah Crockford

…that each of us determines with our thoughts, actions, and behavior. This way of thinking lends itself to prosperity consciousness; that rich people have created that wealth for themselves, that they deserve it, and likewise that the poor deserve their lot. This is not the type of thinking that supports collectivist politics. More generally, there’s a tendency for a form of anti-politics to develop, in which all parties are as bad and corrupt as…

No God but Country: The Religion of John McCain Has Something Important to Tell Us

By Kathryn Lofton

…the words “Christian” and “Christianity” rarely, but when he does, it is always—always—connected with an idea of “America” or “American.” Consider these examples. When Rick Warren asked what faith in Jesus means to him, McCain replied: “Means I’m saved and forgiven. And when we’re talking about the world, our faith encompasses not just the United States of America, but the world.” Elsewhere, in a Time magazine rendition of the dirt cross story, he…

Want to End a Political Career? Be Nice to a Muslim

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…’s a Muslim and he might be associated (with) terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.” But, right wing Christians have been doing their best to paint all Muslims as secret terrorists, releasing a video now making the rounds in conservative churches. The video, titled Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West and released more than a year ago by a group called Clarion Fund, showed images of young children reciting a…

Trump In Colorado: When the “Facts” Are No Longer Checkable

By Paul Harvey

…at world. Any such claim is laughably unpersuasive, despite James Dobson’s best efforts. Rather, I mean “faith” not in any specifically theological sense, but more in the sense of the evidence of things not seen. (The “substance of things hoped for” is what Trump alone can provide, judging from his RNC address). Initially, this came in thinking about Trump’s RNC portrayal of an America in grave peril of mass death from drunk drivers who happen to…

Prophet Muhammad

By Amina Wadud

…ig, too remote—a legacy, yes, but larger than life. Larger than my life anyway. Not just 14 centuries between us, but a whole world, a whole way of being in the world. That changed in the 1980s actually, with one small book by an Arabic historian named Nabia Abbott. She has one book entitled The Beloved of the Prophet and it is about A’ishah, one of the wives of the Prophet. Maybe at another time I can say more about her or the other wives, but th…

“Islam Is Not a Religion”

By Julie Ingersoll

…n the world, cannot resort to debating which interpretation of the text is best, as though the texts exist independent of the people who read them. So Islam can be violent, and so can Christianity. Thankfully other Muslims and Christians want to say that those folks are not “really Muslim,” or “really Christian.” But if all we have is that which scholars call “insider discourse,” then conversations across religious divides become, at worst, dising…

Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…g asks, “Is Vladimir Putin trying to build a new Orthodox empire?” In many ways, it’s the best of times for the Russian Orthodox Church. The vast majority of Russians now identify as Orthodox—a stark change from the immediate post-Soviet period. Recent years have seen a flurry of church construction throughout the country. And perhaps most important of all, there’s a committed believer—Vladimir Putin—in the Kremlin, a man who surrounds himself wit…

Did Pope Francis Just End the Religion and Science Conflict?

By Donovan Schaefer

…deterioration and limited access to birth control. But if Pope Francis is best understood as a religious leader who is reconfiguring the Church not by modifying doctrine, but by moving its moral and intellectual center of gravity, Laudato Si could be the beginning of a paradigm shift, paving the way for a new coalition of religion and science against entrenched corporate and political interests that place the right to maximize profit above all el…