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Of God, But Not God: A Methodist Minister Speaks About Church’s Refusal to Open Its Doors to LGBT

By Joel Pitney

…ere not companionship-based. They were economic arrangements. Okay, that’s number 1. Number 2, let’s say that your wife didn’t provide you with a male offspring. A man could take another wife and another wife and another wife until one of them did. This is the “sanctity of marriage” that is being protected. Are you kidding me? Wow. Okay, so that’s Old Testament. Then along comes Jesus. Well for those of us who follow Jesus, I always like to point…

Malawi Catholic Bishops Call For Enforcement of Sodomy Law; Ukrainian Thugs Disrupt Equality Festival Opposed by Orthodox Church; Indonesian Islamists Continue Rhetorical War on LGBTs; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…he Opera Theatre to be banned. The European Court of Human Rights has on a number of occasions found that the likelihood of counter-events does not justify restricting citizens right to peaceful assembly. The regional police also asked for the ban, although it is they who are obliged to protect all citizens exercising their right to gather. Indonesia: Anti-Gay Islamists Continue Rhetorical War On LGBTs Weeks of escalating anti-gay rhetoric in Indo…

A Matter of the Heart: Talking to Gay Christian Rocker Jennifer Knapp

By Kristin Rawls

…rts and shows, as well as contributing to these dialogues we’re having. My phone’s ringing off the hook, and I’m participating as much as I can in discussions with LGBT lay people and clergy. There are so many people who want to have a positive dialogue about this. I’m getting to the point that I feel like I can engage at a positive level and contribute to that conversation. So, did you follow the recent change in the Presbyterian Church-USA? Th…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

The Burning Houses of Worship We Missed

By Gordon Haber

…g District of Western China, where officials have reportedly bulldozed over 800 mosques. Authorities have also detained hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in re-education camps. The scale of the suffering is difficult to imagine. In fairness, there’s been a lot of good reporting about the plight of the Uighurs. And yet I believe the outpouring of emotion for more recognizable places—especially Notre Dame—is instructive. Samuel Johnson defined sympat…

Boy Scout “Perversion Files” Raise Questions about Abuse in Mormon Contexts

By Joanna Brooks

…elationship between the LDS Church and the BSA. Since 1918, the Church has partnered with the BSA, hosting scout troops in most of its United States congregations. (The New York Times profiled the LDS-BSA relationship—including the experience of gay LDS Boy Scouts impacted by BSA’s LGBT discrimination policies—this week.) Today, a whopping 34% of Boy Scouts troops nationwide are co-sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Bu…

Colorado’s Personhood Initiative Fails—For Now

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

Colorado’s fetal personhood ballot initiative petition failed to get enough valid signatures, and so the measure will not appear on the ballot, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler announced this morning. According to the Denver Post, some of the signatures were deemed invalid, so the petition was found to have only 85,800 valid signatures—305 signatures short of the required 86,105. Jennifer Mason, speaking for Personhood Colorado, said tha…

Something So Broken: What’s Frightening About Beasts of the Southern Wild

By Michael Pasquier

…re Caminada, he discovered that his parents and brother had died along with 800 other residents. Those who survived the flood moved “up the bayou” (as they still say in Lafourche Parish) to towns like Leeville and Golden Meadow. Today, what remains of Cheniere Caminada is a historic marker and a decaying cemetery. Beasts of the Southern Wild is not about saving the Bathtubs of Louisiana. It is about remembering them. “In a million years, when kids…

My God, David Brooks

By John Modern

…t is almost invisible outside the academic world because the text is nearly 800 pages of dense, jargon-filled prose.” Rest assured, we do not need to read Taylor for ourselves because David Brooks can be trusted. His ongoing effort to distill for us the density of jargon is a choice well-honed. The result: a column that we have chosen to read (again, wisely) and, moreover, a readerly choice that becomes a sign to others and ourselves that we are a…

Policing Academic Freedom: A Book, a Controversy, and the Ominous Aftermath

By Michael Jerryson

…in books published The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger. The 800-page book includes over 50 pages of references and covers a vast history that spans 50 million years—a magnum opus from a highly acclaimed scholar of Hindu traditions. A few months after The Hindus was published in the United States, it was favorably reviewed in the New York Times. The award-winning Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra praised the work as “staggeringly compre…