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Competing Visions of Family & Freedom at UN; Methodists Try to Avoid Schism on Sexuality; Catholic Cardinal Denounces LGBT ‘Demonic Ideology’; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ed for decriminalization. Currently the law calls for imprisonment of up to 15 years, though officials told the UN that people are not persecuted for consensual sex. Canada: Government proposes new protections for transgender people This week the Canadian government proposed legislation that would update the Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code, so that “gender identity and gender expression would be considered a distinguishing feature of a pers…

Feeding on the Faithful: How Supernatural Thinking Empowered the Third Reich

By Eric Kurlander

…well-researched and elegantly written account of German occultism from the 1870s through the 1940s. More generally, another recent book that impressed me in terms of ambition and argument was Kris Manjapra’s The Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire. It’s a model of transnational scholarship, but also makes a number of fascinating claims regarding the mutual cultural and intellectual affinities among German and Indian…

The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

By Tony Keddie

…to President Trump, the Supreme Court, and any other elected or appointed official on behalf of their constitutional rights.” There are, as with most of Reed’s biblical analogies, a number of basic textual and historical problems here. To scratch the surface: Roman citizenship would have been rare among the earliest followers of Christ; Paul probably was not a citizen himself (this detail appears in the romanticizing later narrative of Acts of th…

Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) and the Rise of Extreme Evangelicalism

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…one of works, of human effort. Miracles would just muddy the holy water. In 1956, Elisabeth’s husband Jim, along with four other young men, were killed by the very Waorani people of Amazonian Ecuador to whom they had come to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ. The story of their modern day martyrdom was told in Ms. Elliot’s Through Gates of Splendor, published the following year. Copious copies of the book have sold for the past half century and it…

Episcopal Conference Lives Up to Episcopal Jokes

By Julie Ingersoll

…the height of the battling, that it was all not such a big deal, that the number of dissidents was actually quite small and that he thought his church would be better off once they were gone. Indeed, according to Wikipedia there are over 7,000 Episcopal congregations in the US with over 2 million members, though the significance of that number is unclear since, as the priest in the church where I was baptized once teased me: “when you’re baptiz…

Reactionary White Buddhists Have Joined The Fight Against Critical Race Theory

By Ann Gleig

…much of Christian conservative anti-woke rhetoric: “The West has become a spiritual wasteland of ‘progressive’ and materialistic forces. Wokeness masquerades as authentic spiritual tradition, gutting and commodifying ancient teachings to fit its values.” Writing under the signifier “politically incorrect Dharma,” Reynolds had earlier called for an Alt-Buddhism, namely a “relatively conservative, non-feminist (in the emasculating, man-hating socia…

Let’s Get Lost: Mapping Religion in the 21st Century

By Spencer Dew

…map (as compiled by Salatomatic, an Islamic guide to mosques) compiled the number of mosques per state, while the second, using U.S. Department of State data, charts the number of refugees arriving in each state (from October 2014-July 2015), and the third offers “a compilation of Islamic terror activity by state” pairing the names of organizations with U.S. cities (for instance, Boca Raton, Florida, is flagged for “Al Qaeda”). The source for this…

Can The Religious Left Be Effective Again? Longer Answer: Quizás

By Daniel Schultz

…panic churches that participated in a demonstration or march increased from 1 percent to 17 percent. Even though participation rates are increasing among these types of churches, they represent a small percentage of all churches. Fulton explains that a lot of this increase is due to the debates over immigration reform; but even factoring that in, Hispanic churches are becoming more politically active. The number of congregations might be few, but…

Don’t Call It “Prayer Shaming”: Our Moral Failure Exposed

By Willie Dwayne Francois

…d Regional Center in San Bernardino, CA. In the aftermath of the attack, a number of Republican presidential candidates and elected officials issued tweets that, many have argued ad nauseum, demonstrated a commitment to public piety instead of public policy as a response to the massacre. In a rare moment, news and social media outlets in the U.S. became a forum for a surprising debate about spiritual disciplines—the meaning and import of prayer. L…

Pope Francis Has Painted Himself into a Corner on Women Deacons

By Mary E. Hunt

…iano Vagaggini published research on the diaconate in an Italian journal in 1974, the ITC didn’t produce its own work on that subject until about 1997. Along with Vagaggini, that ITC document affirmed what Bishop Imesh had denied years earlier: history supports the argument that women could be sacramentally ordained. Yet while news reports appeared about the document, it was never published by the Vatican. Rumors abound that it had even been assig…