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Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

…e men” who suffered in his fight for Germany’s salvation. Adam continued in 1941: “Christ’s teaching was entirely anti-Jewish in its tenor (that is why he was crucified).” Redefining Jesus as an Aryan began during the nineteenth century and intensified in the decades before and during the Third Reich. Jesus, theologians argued, was born in Galilee, an area populated, they claimed, by racial non-Jews, including Aryans from Iran; his message was wel…

Catholic Bishops Meeting For Family Synod; South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church OKs Gay Weddings, Ordination; Court in Malaysia Deals Setback To Transgender Advocates; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…i last Monday. HRW’s Yuvraj Joshi: The court stepped in to protect Shivy, a 19-year-old transgender man studying neurobiology in California, who was being mistreated by his parents during a family holiday to India. Shivy said his parents confined him to his grandparents’ home in Agra, took away his Indian passport and United States residency card, and compelled him to enroll in a university in Agra. When he ran away, his parents reported him to th…

Norwegian Catholic Church May Stop Civil Marriages; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…GAFCON (Global Anglican Future Conference) met in Nairobi, Kenya from April 18-21. They made plans to training bishops and prepared for GAFCON 2018, which will be the 10th anniversary of the conservative Anglican manifesto, the Jerusalem Declaration, and the third GAFCON conference. According to a GAFCON communique: We are excited to announce that the new chairman of the Primates’ Council is the Most Rev. Nicholas Okoh, Primate of the Anglican Chu…

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…redistribution of wealth are not in the gospel. It’s simply not true. Luke 1:52-53 describes Jesus’ mother, Mary, anticipating his birth with these words: “He [God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” This same Jesus tells us in Matthew 19:24 that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich…

Shocked by Aung San Suu Kyi’s Insensitivity to Ethnic Cleansing? Don’t Be.

By Michael Jerryson

…he held a non-negotiable position on the subject; Wiesel was immovable. While Wiesel was an ardent supporter of human rights for all other cases in the class, he assumed a very different position when it came to the Palestinians. Wiesel had a fetishist disavowal for Palestinians. In her September 19 speech, Aung San Suu Kyi argued that she and her country “condemn all human rights violations.” But for some reason, her ardent advocacy of human rig…

When the Church’s LGBTIQ Loss is the World’s Gain

By Mary E. Hunt

…of becoming a minister. Enter: Presbyterian heterosexism. As a student at San Francisco Theological Seminary in the 1980s, Selisse chose honesty over ordination, integrity over church employment. She tells the wonderful story of her first organizing effort (the prelude to Out & Equal). Along with a “fun group of women, smart, and creative, with whom I felt totally free to be myself,” Selisse started Seminary Lesbians Under Theological Stress—or S…

Openly Gay Mormon Appointed to LDS Church Leadership Position

By Joanna Brooks

…n LDS congregation in San Francisco. Before receiving his call to serve in San Francisco, Mayne had been attending an LDS congregation in Oakland, where Mormons have been especially active in efforts to repair damage to interfaith and LDS-LGBT relations since the LDS Church’s heavy involvement in California’s 2008 Proposition 8 campaign. Mayne was also in a committed, monogamous relationship with his male partner. About a year ago, Mayne decided t…

RIP: Bishop Otis Charles and Rev. Robert Nugent

By Peter Montgomery

…shop to come out as gay, died on December 26 at age 87. Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle profiles Charles: In more than six decades as an Episcopal priest and bishop, the Rev. Otis Charles was an advocate for the underdog, including those left out of the church hierarchy such as women, lesbians and gays. In 1993, he publicly made the gay rights cause his own, and in the process became the first Christian bishop to come out as gay. “I was…

Vatican Reverses Anti-Liberation Policies in Mexico

By Ruth Chojnacki and Jennifer Scheper Hughes

…I replaced as many as 86 of 100 Mexican bishops in two years alone, between 1997-1998. In the most famous case, the indigenous-identified bishop Arturo Lona Reyes of Tehuantepec refused to tender his resignation. The same year, 1997, saw the closing of two Mexican seminaries that seemed to be sympathetic to the Chiapas rebellion. The Mexican pattern of closing seminaries and replacing bishops was repeated throughout Latin America, as the Vatican d…

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

By Sarah M. Pike

…o manifest their ideals on the playa: a community based on gifting; a leave-no-trace policy that models sustainability; financial support for art and artists who are arguably the members of this community with the highest status; and LGBTIQ friendly neighborhoods and streets. Of course the outer world is not absent here. The “default reality” intrudes at every moment. Rampant consumerism occurs before the event and trash bags are tossed on the roa…