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The Trouble With Francis: Three Things That Worry Me

By Mary E. Hunt

…dinals. But on closer inspection, it is clear that women ought not to book tickets to Rome just yet. Juxtaposing “valued” and “clericalized” is odd at best, pernicious at worst. In a church in which ordained male clergy have jurisdiction— that is, authority to make decisions about things that matter—to claim that women who cannot be ordained are valued is a hard case to make. Valued for what and how? We have heard from Francis all about women’s su…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…y’s zingers about 19-year-old Mormon “elders” fall on target. A surprising number of these Christian soldiers haven’t in fact read the Book of Mormon (“Another Testament of Jesus Christ”). Pairs of missionaries (“companions”) do often resent each other; sexual tension, homophobia, homesickness, and boredom strain the relationships of these co-workers/roommates. Many missionaries dislike their geographic assignments. Even as they compete against ea…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…—not Muslim—and Iran—majority-Muslim. In both instances, the American government overthrew democratically elected leaders for fear of what they might do. In 1979, Russia ‘intervened’ to save Afghanistan’s fractious Communist government, which gesture led to the deaths of nearly ten percent of Afghanistan’s population. Afghanistan has still not recovered. Subsequently to this horrifying military intervention, Russia cracked down on a Chechen indepe…

Presidential Pep Talks and the Religion of Fear: How did an Uncontroversial Speech Become a National Controversy?

By Eric Reitan

…as no national controversy. Parents weren’t inundating administrators with phone calls threatening to pull their kids from school in order to protect them from Bush’s efforts at political indoctrination. But this time that’s exactly what happened. And in response to the controversy and the barrage of outraged parental phone calls, many school systems decided it was safest not to air the speech at all. Others required that alternative activities be…

The Failure to Focus on — And Yes, to ‘Cancel’ — Right Wing Antisemitism is a Problem

By Elad Nehorai

…es about George Soros trying to “end civilization” by controlling the government (a conspiracy that directly contributes to violence), they meet with few or no consequences. When trans people are targeted daily by the Right, there’s hardly a whimper in response. When an insurrection occurs, the Republicans who called it “legitimate political discourse” remain in power. There’s been plenty of criticism of course, but that’s not the point; the point…

RDPulpit: The Intolerance of Tolerance Movements

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…, bodily resurrection of Jesus. Lu-in Wang, professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, writes in her book Discrimination by Default: How Racism Becomes Routine: Today, more people seem to embrace egalitarian values and to truly want to treat others fairly. Certainly, they want to see themselves as the kind of people who would not discriminate. Most people probably do not realize the extent to which they do discriminate, however, beca…

Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…the text.” (So it is now, I suppose, that the mostly visual YouTube environment is the most fully global of popular social media sites, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.) Add to these distractions the fact that medieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. A binding might include a bit of Chaucer—something from the life of St. Bridget, perhaps—and…

‘America First’ and the Origin of the Modern Jewish Conspiracy

By Eric C. Miller

…attendant to both. The most striking example occurred in October, when a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood and murdered eleven people. The shooter had been active in anti-Semitic Internet forums, and had declared that he wanted all Jews to die. In doing so, he adopted a conspiratorial mindset with a long and ugly history, much of it traceable through twentieth century Europe. A new book tells that…