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Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…publishing images that “violate public decency.” According to the MEMRI website, Egyptian TV host Tamer Amin explained the official Egyptian position on homosexuality: “We are all sinners. We all make mistakes and commit sins. However, the best among sinners are those who repent, and ultimately, we will all face our Lord. The issue is not whether I make a mistake. The catastrophe is when someone boasts in public about his mistakes, his depravity,…

Gambian Prez Rails Against Gay ‘Evil Empire’; Irish Priest Comes Out During Mass; Trans Talk on Tunisian TV Sparks Debate; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ing that it would be, “In order to cleanse society.” Mexico: Mexicali City Officials Continue to Resist Marriage Equality Last weekend officials in the city of Mexicali continued their refusal to marry Víctor Aguirre Espinoza and Fernando Urias Amparo in spite of an order by Mexico’s Supreme Court more than six months ago that the men could marry. The couple had previously been denied based on claims of incomplete paperwork. This time, the excuse…

Trump’s Pathological Devotion to Border Walls Isn’t Political, It’s Theological

By Alana Massey

…f political processes alone; that borders are the talk and work of elected officials and law enforcement, maintained by taxpayers, and delineated on official government documentation. But it is more accurate to say that borders are the work of mathematics and magic. For example, borders at bodies of water are determined by the distance from a baseline, calculated as the mean of the lower low tides on large-scale nautical charts created and maintai…

New Poll Reveals a Paradox in Evangelical Support for Donald Trump

By Daniel Schultz

…te boundary. Before secular government enthusiasts get too excited by this number I would point out that, for a fair number of evangelicals, the worry is that the state will interfere with the church, not the other way around. Similarly, a little more than one in four White evangelicals said the federal government should declare Christianity the official religion of the United States. Far more (61%) said that Christianity should not be the officia…

Transforming America’s Israel Lobby

By Dan Fleshler

…ed or witnessed abuse of Palestinians. In response, B’Tselem said that the numbers are shocking, but not surprising. The organization commends the military for initiating the survey, but states that physical and verbal abuse of Palestinians by soldiers, particularly at checkpoints, has long become routine. In spite of official condemnations, the military does not do enough to ensure accountability and to deter soldiers from engaging in such behavi…

In Crisis, Catholic Church Plays ‘The Jew’

By Benjamin Weiner

…Committee, felt obliged to declare the remarks: “entirely contrary to the official line and mainstream thought of the Catholic Church.” This comes, however, precisely at a time when “the official line and mainstream thought of the Catholic Church,” particularly with regard to the Jewish people, is a matter of some ambiguity. Since the late 1960s, until quite recently, the mainstream of the Church had been undergoing a radical reconfiguration of i…

Intolerance in Indonesia Extends to Religious Minorities; Lutheran Church in Norway OK’s Same-Sex Marriage, But Not in Finland; Catholic Church Warns Australian CEOs to Back Off Marriage Equality Support; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…But the Archbishop emphasises restraint when it comes to individual church officials going off script… Mäkinen himself drew the ire of church officials when he publicly showed his enthusiasm after the law was passed to permit gender-neutral marriage in December 2014. “I know how much this day means to the rainbow community, their loved ones and many others. I rejoice with my whole heart for them and with them,” he wrote on Twitter at the time. Tur…

Hajj Journal: Door Number 89: The Door with No Name

By Amina Wadud

…d inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out af…

Are Evangelical Films Destined to Leave Secular Audiences Behind?

By Daniel Silliman

…deeply divided on what a faith film should be. This, it would seem, is the site of a deep division within American evangelicalism. There’s a serious difference of opinion over what values should be paramount in making movies. Left Behind could have been the vehicle for showing how this problem could be solved, but it didn’t work. The fight that Lalonde had with authors of the book and that Lalonde had with fans of the movies who were anxious about…

Should NASA Have Given $1.1 Million to a Theology Institute?

By Michael Schulson

…e walls tumbling down? When the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts your phone call on hold, you don’t hear muzak. Instead, the phone system plays a homegrown jingle featuring lines like “Everyone is tired of your piety / get off your knees and get to work” and “We’ve got to fight the battle of church and state / or the walls come tumbling down.” The receptionist told me that FFRF co-president Dan Barker, a former evangelical preacher and occasi…