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Episcopal Church Assault Data Reveals the Dark Side of Inclusive Christianity

…a random sample size and therefore isn’t statistically representative. The number of individuals reporting victimization in Episcopal spaces is alarming nonetheless. However, I would argue the data is more likely to under- than to overestimate the scope of the abuse that occurs. To see why, the survey results must be interpreted in light of the Episcopal Church’s larger culture of inaction around sexual violence. See no evil, hear no evil… LGBTQ+…

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Report from Paris During COP21: Let Us Not Commit Global Suicide

…ine had come to a full stop, even though that was the line for people with reservations. (Reservations? Who knew?) We had gone for the show, not the protest. Being the kind of people who can neither climb poles or stand in long lines, or wait to get busted by the French riot police (they don’t seem to have read Thoreau on civil disobedience) we went across the street to the Petit Palais, where we enjoyed a wonderfully quirky permanent collection (…

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We Went Through Amoris Laetitia Section by Section So You Wouldn’t Have To

…eteronormative uncontracepted sex in monogamous marriage.” Sections 243 and 299 would also disappoint any divorced and remarried Catholics who want to receive Communion openly. Pope Francis says they should be treated with care and kindness and respect, but he stops short of giving them access to receiving Communion. He offers the same condescension to LGBT Catholics in Section 250 when he says should be treated with care, kindness and respect, bu…

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The Battle for the Bible Against Christian Nationalism Seeks to Continue Historic Campaign

…ory of recognizing that the state can use its power to take away religious freedom.” The kind of religious freedom the panelists discussed, of course, isn’t the Orwellian distortion posed by the Christian Right in both its Catholic and evangelical wings, in which religious freedom is invoked in order to justify the oppression of others, but the liberatory idea of religious freedom for all, including the non-religious, that traditional Baptists hav…

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Beyond Alarmism and Denial in the Dominionism Debate

…church, they’re marinating, so to speak, in the the various teachings of a number of people. I’ve covered many an event where I’ve been waiting in line to get in, and the inevitable conversation with the people around you goes something like this: they ask first where you go to church, and second which teachers you admire, and then you get into a long conversation about the relative virtues of all of them. A really good example of how all these te…

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Pope Francis Dithering About Women, Skittish About Cops

…ost other Christian denominations have done with good results. My own deep reservations about the women’s diaconate come from its very nature as a recipe for a woman’s job in a patriarchal culture. Surely it shores up the current system to have women handling all of the everyday work—visiting the sick, caring for children, helping the abused, teaching religious education, which they do already—so that the men can get on with the preaching, teachin…

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Free Arabs: Satire, Disobedience, and Disclaimers

…, the same (almost identically the same) way that Muslim clergy, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, appropriated the Iranian revolution of 1977–1979 entirely for itself, far beyond their own fair share. Free Arabs is right to expose religious anti-intellectualism or fight for the rights of atheists in Arab societies, but their defiance would be much more effective if it rose above colonial constructs of secularists versus Muslims or Islamists. Satirizing…

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American Jewish Leaders Get Gaza Wrong

…ed today. And so must the Israeli shelling of civilians in Gaza (the death toll there is now at 13). It’s not a war game, or an occasion for the cold, sophomoric tweet of the IDF spokesperson (or the tweet back by the Al Qassam Brigades).  Yousef Munayyer provides some history of the numbers from Gaza at Open Zion: For example, in 2011, the projectiles fired by the Israeli military into Gaza have been responsible for the death of 108 Palestinians,…

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Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…

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2018: Wave Goodbye to Another Year in Religion

…een ready to bravely blame somebody else for the problems of life in these United States. Given conservative evangelical support for—and by “support for” we mean “control over”—the Trump administration, it should come as no surprise that on the subject of religious liberties, the story has been one step forward, two steps back … then another two, and give me three more just for good measure. First, the good news: A poll this December shows that no…

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