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Religious Leaders Condemn National Prayer Breakfast; Offer Alternative American Prayer Hour

By Sarah Posner

…aper.” Moses displayed lists of suspected homosexuals published in Ugandan newspapers with headlines like “Top Homos” and “Homo Terror.” People lost their jobs and received death threats as a result of their names being published, he said. Two former evangelical powerbrokers who were familiar with The Family spoke at the press conference: Frank Schaeffer, whose father Francis Schaeffer was a key figure in the religious right, and Bishop Carlton Pe…

‘Iconoclash’ of Civilizations: Missives from the Image Wars

By Eric M. Gurevitch

…rning the scene depicted? Or perhaps it was something in between? *** In a New Yorker essay after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Teju Cole invoked Menocchio, the 16th century miller who is the hero of Carlo Ginzburg’s groundbreaking micro-history, The Cheese and the Worms. Cole uses Menocchio to show that intolerance, iconoclastic intolerance, is definitional to the formation of The West; the anecdote serves to show that this intolerance has always b…

Civil Unions Battle Heats Up in Italy; Church Leaders in Malawi Defend Criminalization of Homosexuality; Report on LGBT Student Group Sparks Backlash in Indonesia; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…makers “have pressures on them, political, cultural, from the church.” The New York Times’ Jim Yardley took an look at divisions over the legislation in Italy, an outlier among western nations in lacking legal recognition for same sex couples, partly because, Yardley writes, “of the lingering influence of the Roman Catholic Church.” In the past, the Catholic Church would probably have played a major role in opposing the legislation (as happened in…

The Flaws in the Latest Anti-Gay Islamic Theology

By Omar Sarwar

…gion’s framing of sexuality and sexual orientation is the exception to the rule of cultural relativism. The correctness of social constructionism is assumed rather than argued for, an assumption made all the more lazy by the simultaneous insistence on the objective normative truth of Islamic values and doctrines. Not to be outdone in logical rigor, Haqiqatjou merely asserts the validity of classical theological and juridical conceptions of what we…

The Next Islamists: The Wide Green Smudge That’s Changing Our World

By Haroon Moghul

…ests billions in embryonic stem-cell research, and Dubai hosts many of the world’s most outstanding infrastructure. We must come to terms with the consequences: practicing Muslims, who consume and produce a distinct worldview, and are more than capable of participating in global realities. Whereas a few decades ago it was assumed that Islam would be secularized into oblivion, the opposite is true. But now that the religion has stuck around long en…

Reverend Billy For Mayor: Is He For Real?

By Nathan Schneider

…sermons in the Times Square Disney Store. Soon, he had an ad-hoc choir, a crusade against corporatizing culture, and a “theology”: God is odd, an Unknown that appears precisely in the spaces where the predictability and packaging of big business is not. He called people to turn away from chain stores and toward each other, allowing themselves to see the miraculous “Godsightings” of ordinary life. Talen says he is not a Christian, but he came to lo…

‘Imagine Better’: Can Harry Potter Change the World?

By B. Howell Belser

…, which held its fourth annual Quidditch World Cup on Nov. 13-14, 2010, in New York City. Potter fans are often passionate, creative, and imaginative, and no organization demonstrates this more clearly than the Harry Potter Alliance. The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) was founded in 2005 by Andrew Slack, Executive Director, and Paul DeGeorge, of wrock band Harry and the Potters, as an organization whose mission is to draw on the language and lessons…

Imagining Fear and Anxiety in Post-9/11 New York

By Haroon Moghul

…allowed to worship so publicly and noticeably near Ground Zero. And since New York City is home to the largest Muslim population in America (probably well over 600,000, or close to ten percent of the city), a number of uncomfortable questions came to the surface. In her debut novel, The Submission, journalist Amy Waldman manages to predict, prepare for, and parse, many of them. We open with a September 11 widow persuading her fellow committee me…

RD News Round-Up—September 29, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…. Matthew 25 Network founder Mara Vanderslice “says her group is hoping to run its latest pro-Obama ad in Cleveland, Youngstown, Cincinnati, and Columbus, as well as in smaller locales such as Findlay and Mount Vernon. Salem Radio affiliate WFHM 95.5 ‘The Fish’ in Cleveland is already running the ad featuring former Democratic Congressman Tony Hall of Dayton and words from the 25th chapter of Matthew.” (To hear the one-minute ad go here) On Septem…

The Pope and Social Media: A Digital Counter-Reformation?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…e, starting with the title, “The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: New Media at the Service of the Word,” made clear that the Vatican did not intend to engage in the sort of wide interactivity, distribution of authority, and mashing of diverse perspectives that is characteristic of the Web 2.0 world. The message makes clear that the task of proclaiming the Word of God belongs primarily to priests, and that they must be trained to be…