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Coming Out on a Christian Campus, Then and Now

By Ed Madden

…a boy—that dunk in the cold baptistery during a gospel revival was more a flight from hell and from my growing sense of sexual difference than a spiritual conviction. After taking the bread and wine that Sunday at Trinity United Methodist Church in Austin’s Hyde Park, I couldn’t get up. I knelt at the altar rail and wept, shaking, still not believing in a God or a community that would accept me just as I am, rather than just how others wanted and…

My Congregation Tried to Help a Syrian Family Settle in the US

By Thomas Warming

…It does make me wonder, though, what would happen if this family got their flight waivers tomorrow and showed up next week. Would they be redirected to Connecticut like the family turned away from Indiana this week? Would they face open hostility, suspicion, even violence, as Muslims in many states have? Would my parishioners still want to befriend them, or would they be cowed or converted by the mean-spirited rhetoric that has been flying loose r…

Getting Back into Blogging

By Amina Wadud

…roup lands in the holy city with an inflatable Eiffel tower. That’s how I knew it was partially about the hajj. My flight itinerary is set. I fly directly from San Francisco to Paris, and then from Paris to Jeddah, which is like the port city for hajjis. Apparently in the dream, someone was so anxious to show they had gone through Paris, they sort of took anything—because, clearly in the dream, no merit was ascribed to that particular choice. It w…

Stem Cell Chronicles: Why Politics and Science Most Certainly Should Not Be Separated

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…en the bail-out plan consists primarily of printing out staggering sums of new money and dumping it on research and development. That’s where the politics will not go away, nor should it. The US taxpayer is funding this science; the US citizen has the right to some voice in the vetting process whereby new scientific proposals are approved for funding. The scientists are quite right to remind us that all such proposals are vetted by a rigorous revi…

That Mercenary Feeling: What the Apparently Unlimited Use of “Contractors” Says About American Empire in Afghanistan and Iraq

By Peter Laarman

…o military personnel there is the highest of any war in U.S. history. In a new study, the Congressional Research Service reports that contractors make up 65% of the Pentagon’s overall forces in Afghanistan over the past two years. And this is just for the Pentagon: the new CRS report does not address contractors working for the State Department or CIA in Afghanistan. Part of what this means, Glanz notes, is that ordinary Afghans are likely to see…

What NOT to Expect from the Pope’s US Visit

By Anthea Butler

…to the press on the flight from Cuba to America. Cindy Wooden of Catholic News Service reported that, in response to questions about being a communist and Newsweek‘s “Is the Pope Catholic?” headline, he responded: “I am certain I have never said anything more than what is in the social doctrine of the church. I follow the church and in this, I do not think I am wrong.” That is key to understanding Pope Francis’s visit. For all of the talk about c…

Claude, Adieu: A Farewell to Lévi-Strauss

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…nd his happenstance return to Brazil (he was granted a visa to come to the New School of Social Research in New York, but got held up in French Martinique, and eventually made his way back to Brazil where he sat out the war). His intellectual formation was very, very French (it is painful, this necessary turn to the past tense). He cut his teeth on Freud, Bergson, Saussure, Marx, the German Phenomenologists and French Existentialists. How he found…

My Kind of Atheist

By Peter Laarman

…st ennoble us as humans. (In one chapter deploring the reductionism of the New Atheists, Schaeffer writes: “I feel significant when I tell my stories, therefore I am.”) The book is thronged with revealing vignettes about persons who have touched Schaeffer deeply: his dear sweet mother most of all, but also a family friend who finally surrenders to a merciless cancer, and even an opera singer he meets and befriends on a transatlantic flight. Much o…

Conservative Points in Pope’s Speech Include Liberal “Chasers”

By Patricia Miller

…enies that he has either a liberal or a conservative agenda. During his in-flight presser on Tuesday afternoon, he said it was a mistake to interpret him as “left-ish”: It is I who follows the church … my doctrine on all this … on economic imperialism, is that of the social doctrine of the church. While that may be true, the reality is that the social doctrine of the Catholic Church is a left-leaning doctrine that emphasizes communitarianism, disd…

Religious Resistance to Bolivian Gender Law; US Religious Right Celebrates Court OK For Romanian Marriage Initiative; Will LGBTs Be Banned from Indonesian TV?; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ied social group, or that they could simply hide their sexuality. Bolivia: New gender identity law meets religious and political resistance The Washington Post’s Simeon Tegel writes about Bolivia’s new gender identity law, which allows people to change the gender listed on official documents. Tegel says it means that “Bolivia joins Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia as the only four nations in the deeply Catholic region to recognize the needs of tran…