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Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…ith members of the same sex. For gay Christians caught between a religious world where homosexuality is unacceptable and sex in general is suspect and a gay world that can seem to celebrate shallow sexual conquest, the kind of deep intimacy between men the ex-gay world offers may well be sufficient for homo-oriented men. Trading sexual intimacy with men for its other variations may well be worth the deal. But, again, this is not a change in orient…

Pope Warns of “Christianophobia”

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…he sun was setting over an entire world,” he observed, and the end of that world seemed foreshadowed in disasters both natural and man-made. Christians, we should recall, were on yet ascendant in that world, since the power of their God had not yet risen up over it. In that spirit of brooding retrospect, the Pope, to his credit, turned to what should clearly be a dominant concern for this papacy in this somber time: what he called (echoing Revelat…

A Church (Further) Divided: Putin’s Patriarch Now Faces a Rebellion From Within the Russian Orthodox Church

By Katherine Kelaidis

…ointing once again to the deep divides that animate the Orthodox Christian world—both inside and outside of Russia—and play a significant role in the continuing conflict in Ukraine. Despite what some in the Western press have been willing to believe, Patriarch Kirill has not been an advocate for peace. In fact, he has at times seemingly gone out of his way to provoke the situation, conjuring the memory of old hatreds and false histories. This has…

Religion Round-Up: What’s Going on in Religion Around the World

By Diane Winston

…logy. More than 20 years ago, sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s classic The Restructuring of American Religion posited that education, mobility, and socioeconomic factors were trumping theological differences among American Protestant denominations. Some took Wuthnow’s argument as proof text for the culture war, but it also explains the softening of theological boundaries among the mainline and the triumph of pragmatics (shrinking budgets) over dogmati…

Does Multiverse Theory Bring Theology Into Science?

By Andrew Aghapour

…trying to answer the metaphysical and mythological questions of where the world came from and how. Worlds Without End could be read as an underdog story. Is the multiverse finally having its day? The first serious multiple-worlds scenario to emerge in the modern scientific context was the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of Quantum Mechanics, which Hugh Everett posited in the late 1950s. The next versions to come around were the “new” and “chaoti…

Don’t Overlook Endless War in Rise of ISIS

By Haroon Moghul

…s, Zionists aimed to colonize Palestine, and the Russians wanted the Bosphorus. World War I gave them their chance. But let’s focus on Iraq. Largely Indian forces, mostly Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus under British command, seized Baghdad from the Ottomans by the end of the First World War. The modern nation of Iraq was born when the British fused three former Ottoman provinces, with major demographic differences between them, and gifted them to a Kin…

State of the Union Stuck in that Olde-Time Semi-Niebuhrianism

By Ira Chernus

…of this tragic path. Though he should be thanked for wanting to wage the struggle with China in economic and not military terms, he ramped up that struggle in the SOTU, warning that the Chinese are outstripping us technologically and we must “win the future,” despite all the risk such belligerent talk entails. Perhaps a foreign policy Niebuhrian can be expected to do no less. On the other hand, if we reject Niebuhr’s premise of endless conflict in…

Noah’s All-White Ark, and Other Odd Directorial Choices

By Wil Gafney

…t transparent enough to see their lily-white skins. Noah speaks of the destruction of the whole world and eventually, with great reluctance, the re-peopling of the world—which seems to be all white. As origin stories Genesis and Enoch are not scientific texts, but they do have their own logic: earth brown humans are crafted from the brown earth humus and from them descend peoples of all nations. The ancient Israelites who crafted and preserved the…

What Role Should Religion Play in the Public Square? — A Black Christian and a Black Secular Humanist Debate and Discuss

By Brad R. Braxton and Anthony B. Pinn

…e world. BRAXTON: A “grammar of compassion”—that’s a beautiful phrase. The world surely needs more compassion. I won’t begrudge people about whether their motivation for compassionate problem-solving arises from religious or secular sources. We just need to address these public problems. When teaching in divinity schools and seminaries, I remind students that prophetic religion involves more than simply naming social problems. Constructive and ima…

Without Bev Shea, No Billy Graham

By Douglas Harrison

…the process of becoming one of gospel’s first mega-stars, one foot in the world of revivalistic ministry, the other squarely planted in the post-World War II booming Christian entertainment business, Shea modeled what it looked like for a man of God to be fully in the modern world of getting and spending on a vast new scale—to stand bestride the world of Christian music in the age of mass-market reproduction, at least as much as a single man sing…