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55% of Utah Mormons Believe LGBT People can “Change”

By Joanna Brooks

…of us who live within the culture know: many, many LDS people live in a parallel universe when it comes to the reality of LGBT experience. Just a few weeks ago, I was visiting with a friend who has a gay adult child. We discussed the nuances of the recent events surrounding Elder Boyd K. Packer’s abrasive and controversial October conference talk which asserted that God would never have people be born with “tendencies” to same-sex attraction, and…

What Pence and Kaine Reveal About Divides in Catholicism

By Patricia Miller

…sometime in the 1990s conservative Catholics began to sound more like evangelicals, asserting not just their right but their duty to impose their religiously-based views on others. And indeed for a time Pence considered himself an “Evangelical Catholic” before finally making the transition to full-on evangelicalism. And it’s that divergence that was on full display Tuesday evening when the candidates were asked to discuss “a time that you have str…

Do Space Aliens Need Baptism? The View From Gliese 581g

By Paul Wallace

…or a long time, starting with the founding of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in 1959. Today, SETI is funded by private money and NASA funds an extensive Astrobiology research program. In its 2008 Roadmap, this program states the following as its first goal. Understand the nature and distribution of habitable environments in the universe. Determine the potential for habitable planets beyond the Solar System, and chara…

Commies, Blacks, Jews, the UCC and Other Threats to America

By Daniel Schultz

…the Weekly Standard. He strains at gnats because ultimately he has nothing else to fall back on, no compelling ideology, no good news for anyone who hasn’t been following his worn-out shtick for thirty years. So, good if they’re afraid of the religious left. It means we’re doing our job. And just in case anyone missed the number of religious progressive groups endorsing the rally, here’s a list culled from One Nation site. Their list of endorsers…

Halloween, Evangelicals, and the Macabre

By John W. Morehead

…ws festooned with fake cobwebs and, on a slightly less positive note, evangelicals intensifying their critique of all things macabre and “occultic.” American evangelicalism has always had a strong sense of evil which it battles in various manifestations—frequently in the form of popular culture. This sense of the presence of and confrontation with evil, however, ramps up during the Halloween season whether the focus is the holiday itself or those…

We Were Here Before September 11th

By Amina Wadud

…r Islam in the closet. Then the events of September 11th shook the proverbial skeletons out of that closet. And lo and behold, now they are Muslims and they are the primary spokepersons about this new popular trend of Islam in America. Some even made a considerable amount of money off of their version of the “I am your friendly neighborhood Muslim; and I am an American;” as if Muslims didn’t exist in America before they became spokespersons. Or ma…

Why Anti-Gay Bullying is a Theological Issue

By Cody J. Sanders

…itical right in keeping LGBT persons silent and subjugated. Whereas political rallying on issues like same-sex marriage and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell serve to maintain some ground on the preservation of anti-gay cultural ideology, the intermittent reinforcement of violent attack is an even better tool to ensure the silence (and suicide) of LGBT people and their subjugation to the closet. While a majority of LGBT people may avoid ever bec…

Special Hell: Progressive Catholics Reckon With the Rise of Trump

By Patricia Miller

…their prophetic voice.” The U.S. bishops see Trump not merely as a potential ally in appointing a conservative justice to replace Antonin Scalia (who would help roll back abortion rights) but also in an aggressive expansion of “religious liberty.” In a letter to the advisory board of conservative Catholics that Trump assembled in October, he promised, “I will stand with Catholics and fight for you”: I will defend your religious liberties and the…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…ted that the growing sense of religion’s decline has less to do with personal religiosity than with events. The last time religious influence was deemed to be in sharp decline was the 1960s. Political protests along with cultural upheavals left many wondering about the future of traditional institutions. But during the Reagan years, and especially following 9/11, the significance of religion—its association with social stability, community cohesio…

More Than Big Hair and Money: Jim, Tammy Faye and the Media “Holy Wars” of the 80s

By John Wigger

…ed you to write PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire? I was fascinated by how fast PTL grew and how quickly it fell apart. What I really wanted to know was how PTL’s rise and fall were connected. How does deep religious devotion become so entwined with money, sex, and celebrity on a Hollywood scale? A short synopsis might help: Jim and Tammy started the PTL network with half a dozen employees in a former furnitu…